Fanfic / Flashback (MHA)

Flashback by Psyckosama is a My Hero Academia Peggy Sue fanfiction.

The moment before Izuku is set to receive One for All, Eri suddenly arrives in a panic and with a desperate need to pass off her own version of One for All before she explodes.

In a twist befitting most classic superhero plots, 12 years from this point aliens would invade and conquer the Earth. With the last of the rebellious survivors and an inherited One for All, Eri departed this Bad Future to a point where they could change things for the better. Only if the world pushes toward the stars and a coalition between heroes and villains is formed can humanity as we know it survived.

That said, this is mostly background. The main story so far focuses more on Eri adapting to the past and figuring out who she is as a mesh between the remains of a freedom fighter in her late 20s and a 6-year-old girl, Izuku's changing circumstances and adaptation to his new power, and a freshly rewound All Might slowly beginning to really live again while beginning to assemble a team.

Can also be found on Archive of Our Own, and in forum form on Questionable Questing.

Last updated July 2021.

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Flashback contains examples of:

• Abhorrent Admirer: Part of Mount Lady's distaste for the country is due to the number of farming families who approached her in hopes of enticing her to accept a Quirk Marriage, seeing her Sizeshifter Quirk as being incredibly useful for farm work.
• Abled in the Adaptation: Thanks to Eri rewinding him, All Might's body is no longer atrophied, and all of his organs are in perfect condition, making him a much better crime fighter and allowing him to actually eat real food again.
• Accidental Truth: Ochako wonders if All Might suddenly becoming more active is the result of him changing his diet, noting that most of his branded foods aren't very healthy. He has changed his diet, and there is a correlation between that and his increased heroic activities, but it's not what she thinks: His being healed means that he no longer has to subsist on medicines and nutrient shakes, and so he's back on his old diet of unhealthy American-style fast food.
• Adaptational Badass: Thanks to the Past-Life Memories that came from his Alternate Self being a previous user of One for All, Izuku is able to quickly start tearing into the robots during the Entrance Exam using a small but still significant amount of One for All's power.
• Alien Invasion: The reason for the Bad Future. Because humanity's technology had stagnated ever since Quirks first came around, they were unable to repel them, leading to Eri being sent back to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
• All-Loving Hero: All Might and Izuku, naturally. They are easily two of the nicest and friendliest characters in the setting.
• Animal Stereotypes: Zigzagged. Mirko hates when people try to apply certain bunny tropes to her, like "meek" and "cowardly" and "soft". On the other hand, she does like carrots (especially carrot cake).
• Ascended Fanboy: Izuku, obviously, and it turns out All Might is a massive comic book geek, owning both a mint condition original Action Comics #1 as well as Kirk Alyn's ^* the first person to portray Superman on film Superman costume. In fact he owns an entire museum exhibit's worth of authentic comic book movie props and outfits that he keeps on display in his apartment, including multiple Superman suits worn by different actors, his favorite is Christopher Reeve's version.
• Author Appeal: The storywriter is a self-admitted foodie with a deep love of traditional American junk food, and enjoys writing Food Porn, which is one of the reason he adopted the Fanon that Stockpile Quirks absorb the vast majority of ingested calories into their energy reserves: to give an excuse for Eri, Izuku, and All Might to be regularly "eating like a trio of Saiyans coming off a week long fast".
• Bad Future: Where Eri came back from. Aliens invade the Earth and begin harvesting us for our Quirks. It's so bad that All For One and Toga are considered pillars of the resistance. They resort to giving Eri One For All and dosing her to the gills with Trigger, just to be able to undo this world.
• Bash Brothers: Izuku and Tenya very quickly establish this dynamic during the Entrance Exam.
• Beneath the Mask: No one can doubt All Might’s optimism and his willingness to make the world a better place, but internally, he was exhausted and tired of the grim reality of his hero career, pushing himself to the brink to save people despite the injury he got lest society goes bottom-up. However…
  • Becoming the Mask: Since Eri reverted back All Might’s body back to its prime, he regains the idealism he once lost and sees to not only defeat the bad guys but also help those who are in need. The idealism that he partially wore as a mask to keep society’s stability ends up being part of him.
• Big Eater: A common occurrence in people with Stockpile Quirks like Rewind and One for All. Rather than relying on some physical catalyst to power their Quirk (such as Bakugou's sweat glands, or Hitoshi Shinsou's voice), Stockpile Quirks have to be charged up independently first with metabolic energy before they can be used. For reference: a post-recovery All Might has, for a "light" lunch, two barbeque bacon double cheeseburgers (with one-pound patties!), four-foot-long chili cheese dogs, a basket of cheese fries, a plate of buffalo chicken wings, and an extra-large meat-lover's pizza. Which he washes down with two liters of chocolate protein shake and a pint of whole milk.
  • Mirko is another: her Quirk only gives her an advantage in developing her muscles, which are otherwise natural, and she has to feed them.
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: The "Three-Alarm Chili" on All Might's personalized chili dogs. It's definitely more than Midnight (who was basically deepthroating one, in an attempt to win a flirting contest with All Might) can handle.
  While not as hot as his wings, which in true hot wing tradition were so spicy that some questioned their fitness for human consumption, the Three Alarm Chili on those dogs was still not for the faint of heart. Nor the faint of stomach.
  Nor the faint of sphincter, if he wanted to be completely honest...
• Brilliant, but Lazy: All for One has been promised to be this; the man has a genuine fascination for the development and expression of Quirks that rivals Izuku's, and his own Quirk gives him a natural intuition for their intricacies, use, and growth potential, however he also completely refuses to put any effort into cultivating or mastering any powers himself; preferring to, for example, stack 20 similar powers into one mighty effect rather than just take one and train to make it stronger, which he explicitly could if he cared to.
• Butter Face: Cuddlebug, The Medic of Team Idaten, wears a nurse's outfit and has the body and personality to match... while her head is an entire spider the size of her torso, complete with its own legs. Izuku has to fight off the dread when she hugs him to make use of her Healing Hands Quirk.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Eri really would rather erase All for One from life like she intends to for Overhaul and certain other villains, but his sheer power, intelligence, and resources are vital for the preparation of Earth's defenses, to say nothing of the applicability of his Quirk, which they cannot simply remove or duplicate easily.
• Cat Up a Tree: All Might believes that saving a lost pet is no less heroic than taking down a super criminal. There is a scene where he is shown happily rescuing a little girl's cat from a tree.
• Cardboard Prison: Invoked and justified; in America, most supervillains are essentially counter-cultural protestors with a flair for the dramatic, so they tend to get very light punishments.
• Cartoonish Supervillainy: In a conversation with Midnight, All Might notes that the majority of American supervillains are largely harmless, to the point it's noted that Gentle Criminal is more in the mold of the typical American supervillain. The primary motivations to villainy are either a very dramatic form of protesting, or just wanting to fight a superhero so they can gauge their own strength. He observes that this attitude was probably fostered by America having much more forgiving laws regarding the use of Quirks and lethal force in self-defense, so violent criminals tend to get killed quite quickly. He does note that there are exceptions to this rule, and that any veteran American supervillain prone to habitual violence tends to easily equal if not exceed the worst of any Japanese supervillains.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: All Might endures this in spades. It is not just that he wants to help people, he is constantly having to deal with incidents that spring up around him.
  Toshinori: "Sometimes it feels like I can’t go down to the corner store for some milk and oranges without having to deal with three muggings and a lost kitten...”
  He wasn’t even kidding about the kitten. That was the sad part. Though sometimes it was a puppy.
  • From a later meeting between him and Midnight.
    Midnight: So what happened?
    All Might: (shrugs) Eighteen muggings, nine car accidents, seven robberies, six sexual assaults as well as the obligatory lost pets... and I had to break up a brawl between a couple guys with Kaiju quirks in Nara who were fighting over a girl. (...) Thankfully, there were no fatalities, but there were a couple close calls.
    She nodded stiffly. If this was the workload of the Number One... well... any Pro who claimed that they didn’t want to be number one was either lying to you or lying to themselves. But hearing this, this wonderful, heroic, self-sacrificing man... he was welcome to it.
• Clueless Chick-Magnet: All Might, of all people. Current list of ladies he's unknowingly charmed include Mt. Lady, Midnight, Mirko, and possibly Inko. The author fully admitted that part of his goal with this fic was to finally give All Might a turn as a blundering harem fanfic protagonist.
• Cool Car: All Might's civilian transport is a 1968 Shelby Cobra GT-500. That's a 300-year-old classic muscle car, which for some reason he thinks is inconspicuous. (Unless he means relative to the Allmobile, which can fly.)
• Cruel to Be Kind: A lesser version: All Might punches Jin Bubaigawara (a.k.a. Twice) in the face hard enough to break his nose, in order to prove to the man that he is the real Jin, and not just one of his own clones (which would have been dispelled by that much damage), ending the man's existential crisis and allowing All Might to talk to him and help him get into therapy for it.
• Cultural Cringe: All Might notes that he does love Japan as his birth country, but there are some areas where he thinks America does things better. Most explicitly, he disapproves of the Japanese cultural emphasis on conformity as a virtue, as he considers it antithetical to the very concept of Heroes.
• Dagwood Sandwich: Izuku's pre-exam "meal", as per All Might's warnings about "needing the calories".
  He called it an "All American On the Go Super Breakfast". Izuku called it a belly busting monster. A giant sandwich made out of ham, bacon, sausage, some ungodly substance he identified as 'scrapple'^note essentially fried pork-scraps meatloaf, and eggs... and fried and served between two full-sized pancakes that had been drizzled with maple syrup as if it were a sandwich sauce. With a side of fried potatoes with ketchup.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique:
  • Downplayed, however even with his newfound and surprising ease at using it, One For All is still quite rough on Izuku's body if he overdoes it.
  • The way Eri time-traveled was insanely dangerous and involved juicing up her own Quirk with dangerous amounts of Quirk-enhancing drugs and the most powerful stockpiling Quirk on the planet. Further, when she finally meets with All Might and Izuku, she's barely holding herself together and needs to pass on OFA by mixing her blood directly with Izuku's, instead of waiting for the hair to digest naturally.
• Dare to Be Badass: Izuku unintentionally inspires this during the entrance exam, while muttering to himself about the advice All Might gave him. As a result, so many participants – now more concerned with actually acting like heroes, rather than simply passing the exam – end up racking up massive amounts of Rescue Points, to the point that the faculty has to devise a third point scoring system and commission a third Hero Course class in order to keep up!
• Deadpan Snarker: Eri can get quite sassy. All Might also gets snarky when dealing with the Hero Commission when they try to get in the way of his hero work.
• Determinator: Eri. Poor girl inherits One For All in the Bad Future before sending her memories back to her younger self. She then finds out that One For All came back with her and is currently tearing her body apart. What does she do? She puts her Rewind quirk into overdrive to keep her body stable. The will and mental focus required to keep her Quirk locked to a moment for so long through the immense pain and unfamiliar, weakened body while also fighting her way out of Chisaki's hideout and figuring out how to reach Izuku must have been beyond Herculean.
• Diabolus ex Nihilo: The reveal that Eri came back in time fleeing an alien invasion was quite contentious when first written, but the author has explained that an Outside-Context Problem was the only way to justify the kind of plot they wanted.
  If the problem was the villains then they wouldn't be forced to work with the villains. Logical, innit?
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?: Izuku has one of his mutter storms at the entrance to UA, where he tries to quell his anxiety about the Entrance Exam by repeating what All Might told him earlier. It's only when Uraraka thanks him that he realizes he said all of that out loud to a small crowd surrounding him. Fortunately, they interpret it positively. See Dare to Be Badass above.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: The Sand Hero, Snatch. In canon, he is killed by the League of Villains, during the finale of the Shie Hassakai arc. Here, he dies months earlier, as part of Number 6's I Surrender, Suckers ploy.
• Dirty Harriet: Midnight specializes in breaking up prostitution, slavery, and drug rings, often by letting herself be taken in as "product" to info-gather and disrupt from the inside. Sir Nighteye at least is in genuine awe of her willingness to lay her dignity and physical integrity so readily on the line.
• Doorstopper: Currently at thirty chapters and over 150K words… and the first day of classes still hasn't even started yet!
• Double Entendre: Midnight's friendly banter with All Might during the UA Entrance Exam is of course laden with this. Unusually, All Might not only gives as good as he gets, but even comes out the victor in their exchange. (Admittedly, part of the latter is because she tries to flirt by suggestively swallowing a hot dog that is slathered in Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce, and spends the rest of the meeting sulking while nursing a glass of milk.)
• Driven to Villainy: Saiko Intelli was branded a villain by the Hero Commission in the Bad Future for daring to criticize flaws in hero society, calling her no different than Stain and the MLA, even though her criticisms were more tactless and unintentionally condescending than violent and she intended them to be helpful. Between the Commission, negative public reactions, Seiai Academy poorly preparing her to face rejection of her ideas and enabling her bad habits, she ended up becoming "Solomia", a Moriarty-style mastermind. Becomes Harsher in Hindsight when canon itself later reveals just what the Commission has been willing to stoop to, in times past, in order to stay in power.
• Embarrassing Ringtone: Absolutely everybody thinks that All Might's "A Phone Call Is Here!" ringtone is stupid. Even Sir Nighteye, an Ascended Fanboy of All Might who still collects his merchandise, calls it idiotic to All Might's face.
• Enemy Mine: The aliens in the Bad Future were such a threat that the villains of Earth, including All For One, joined forces with the heroes to fight against them. Eri plans to do the same as practically possible to prepare humanity for the invasion, though obviously her present-day allies have their reservations.
• Erotic Eating: Midnight tries this during a friendly Double Entendre battle with All Might using a chili dog. Unfortunately for her, the hot dog is slathered with All Might's personal "Three Alarm Chili" recipe, which leaves her sulking with a carton of milk for the rest of the meeting they're in.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • All For One being one of La Résistance's most dedicated fighters in the Bad Future falls under this. Eri even refers to him as one of humanity's most stalwart defenders.
  • American supervillains reject being called "clowns" because, in All Might's own words, nobody wants to be compared to Mister Smiles.
• Exact Words: When Inko asks who taught Izuku, he replies that the hero wanted to keep their identity secret and works out of Might Tower. Since multiple heroes work out of Might Tower and have offices there, Inko doesn't suspect the true culprit, All Might, who owns the building.
• Explosive Overclocking: Tenya "redlines" himself during the exam, trying to save first Uraraka from the Zero-Pointer, then Midoriya after the latter obliterates said Zero-Pointer and then passes out in midair from the strain. At the end, Tenya's calf-engines are visibly glowing red from overheating, and have to be cooled off first before Recovery Girl can heal him.
• The Fatalist: Sir Nighteye was a firm believer in fate, even if that fate was a bad one, as per canon. However, upon learning that his quirk literally can't perceive Eri, he starts to believe that the future actually can be changed.
• Fat Bastard: Bukimi Taika, an original character drug dealer. In the original timeline, he was a Paranormal Liberation Front member who kidnapped Midnight and used his quirk, Dupe, to make a dead copy of her to throw off any search attempt and harvested her sleep gas to make and sell date rape drugs.
• Fiction 500: Between the salary, rewards for catching criminals, endorsements, and merchandising, being a top ten Hero pays very well. All Might has literally held the Number One spot for a generation, and as a result is now one of the top fortunes of Japan, to the point where he stopped keeping track of how much money he has or worrying about if he can afford things. This is a contributing factor to his accidental harem protagonist status: to him, a $5,000 designer dress is no more expensive than a $5 cup of coffee, and he doesn't get what giving a woman the former as opposed to the latter might look like to someone who is constrained by a budget.
• Fountain of Youth: All Might is in his late 40s/early 50s. Thanks to Eri rewinding him, his body is now in its mid-twenties. Eri has also expressed a willingness to rewind other heroes to their prime once she has the opportunity to refill her stockpile of energy.
• Freudian Excuse: Defied; Sir Nighteye digs into Magne's past after All Might brings her in and finds no history of discrimination or abuse over her trans status, suggesting that revenging herself against society is a made-up rationale for her criminal inclinations. This is supported by Magne bragging to a plainclothes Toshi that she goes out of her way to hurt people because she likes to and can get away with it.
• Furry Reminder: At one point, Sir Nighteye drinks tea offered by Nezu. Nezu's custom tea blend is noted to be geared towards whatever he is rather than a human. At another point, Eri reveals he wouldn't live near as long as a human.
• Genre Blind: All Might is not happy that he completely failed to miss the most obvious clue that All For One was still alive.
  Toshinori’s jaw gritted as he thought back to his greatest failure. Damn it Toshinori, doesn’t matter if your guts are decorating half the goddamned landscape, the Joker isn’t dead if you don’t have a body!
• Genius Bruiser: All Might is portrayed as having a mind to go with his power. His buffoonish act is nothing more than that.
• Good is Not Nice: Learning that Nedzu is personally dealing with Bukimi, Midnight gets a feeling she explicitly calls schadenfreude. We later see Nedzu confront the man with a smile and a barely-hidden promise that he's going to break every bone in his body.
• Goofy Print Underwear: A morbidly embarrassing case where Eri shows All Might a pair of little girls' underwear brought to her from one of his merchandise stores...with his face plastered where the crotch is. To makes matters worse, the back of the underwear has his "I Am Here" catchphrase, but due to the choice to use kanji and the highly contextual nature of the Japanese Language, it can end up being interpreted as "I Came". Eri and All Might are understandably mortified, especially given this was noted as something that was taught to be avoided when it came to branding merchandise in-universe.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • On Eri's recommendation, Gentle Criminal and La Brava are recruited by All Might, using a series of laws (even referred to as the "Heel–Face Turn laws"!) left over from the early days of Quirks, over a century ago.
  • A lesser example, but All Might also takes on the Crawler as his newest sidekick, bringing him into the fold as a proper Hero rather than a Vigilante.
  • Also played with regarding Twice, as All Might recruits him before he ever falls into villainy in the first place – but as janitorial staff, rather than as a hero. (This is for the sake of giving Twice steady employment, where he knows he won't be taken advantage of for his Quirk.)
  • However, it should be noted that not everyone on Eri's list of potentially recruitable villains wants to be redeemed. Magne turned out to be totally unrepentant and All Might eventually gave up on attempting redemption and made the arrest. Sir Nighteye notes that because the list of recruits was supplied by Toga, there are probably several individuals on there that should just be sent to prison and/or forced to attend therapy, and it's only because All Might is being himself about it that they're going to try and recruit them first.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: How All Might and Izuku cover up how Izuku now has super-strength and speed when he was diagnosed as Quirkless a decade previously: it takes time for a stockpile Quirk to gather enough energy to do anything noticeable, and at the time of his original diagnosis there hadn't been time. How would anyone have been able to tell that Izuku had a Quirk when at that level of charge it would have made him slightly more energetic than he should have been at age four?
• Horrible Judge of Character: When UA teachers begin comparing Bakugou's personality to Endeavor, Toshinori fails to see a problem as Endeavor is an exemplary Hero. He also credulously takes at face value all of Toga's nakedly rose-tinted assessment of her old League of Villains compatriots, down to condemning Hawks for killing Twice even though he had given him a chance to surrender. Sir Nighteye finds his patience tested by this habit.
• Insufferable Genius: Intelli Saiko's quirk gives her Super-Intelligence, but also slight Lack of Empathy and No Social Skills as side-effects. In the Bad Future, she became enabled by the favoritism and cliquish student culture of Seiai Academy, to the point of publicly and tactlessly critiquing the Hero Public Safety Commission over frustration with the Hero Ranking System, which they overreacted to with immediate disbarment and hit pieces. This spiraled and eventually led to her becoming a Moriarty-style villain who used her intelligence to create complex plots that entangled heroes while releasing videos that derided society.
• I Surrender, Suckers: Beyond the simple fact that he knew damn well there was no escaping All Might, Number 6 gives himself up without a fight because, by playing the part of the cowed captive, the prisoner transport would be much more lax in restraining him and he could catch them off guard with the powers he hadn't demonstrated yet.
• It Belongs in a Museum: All Might's 20th-Century hero memorabilia collection for all intents and purposes is a museum, though not one open to the public. Midnight suggests that he may want to change that.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Number 6 accepts All Might's call to surrender immediately, after witnessing the man catch his strongest blow like it was nothing.
• Life Will Kill You: Nezu's heart would give out on him in about 10 years from the start of canon. Eri intends to fix that.
• Like an Old Married Couple: Played With and nearly an Inverted Trope; Tenya's parents literally are a middle-aged long-term marriage, but are perfectly frank that they only hooked up for reasons of Quirk synergy and treat each other as mixture of sex-buddy roommate and coworker with a barely tolerable personality. Tenya for his part is deeply ashamed and developing a complex over their flaunting of their lack of genuine romance, and is irritated by their incessant verbal slap fights.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Gentle is fully aware that La Brava is codependent on him and that nothing can really be done to fix that, due to her Quirk's influence on her psyche. He begs All Might to make sure she doesn't kill herself or rebound on someone more willing to exploit her if he should fall, and is ready to turn down the opportunity to be a hero when La Brava proves uncomfortable in the role before she insists she just has to grow into it.
• Ludicrous Gibs: The amount of force Izuku used on the villain proxies on the Iidas' obstacle course was downright excessive.
• Married to the Job: It's mentioned that after becoming All Might, Toshinori was always in All Might mode, constantly putting his duty before his personal life. This is hinted to be part of the reason Sir Nighteye had his falling out with All Might. After being healed of his Game-Breaking Injury by Eri, he decided this time, he would make time for Toshinori to have his own life.
• Masochist's Meal: Realizing that regular meals, even massive ones, weren't restoring the energy reserves for her Quirk fast enough to be ready for U.A.'s recommended student tests in a few days, Eri forces herself to eat a mixture of raw cane sugar and vegetable oil. It turns out to only barely be enough.
• Metaphorgotten: Mirko compares All Might's power as basically the same as her own Quirk, just hopped up on crystal meth. And a few lines of coke. And Trigger. All the goddamned Trigger. Don't forget anabolic steroids. It is at that point she realizes she's gotten a bit sidetracked by her analogy.
• Monster Clown: The persona of a particularly infamous villain in America named Mr. Smiles, and a reason why even the most campy villains hate to be called clowns. All Might describes him as someone who looked at The Joker and said "Hold my beer," outright calling him one of the few people to be even worse than All For One.
• Mugging the Monster: Magne's shakedown of who she thinks is a helpless victim just because she can comes to an abrupt end when an undercover All Might decides that he's done judging her potential to be rehabilitated, and clearly is found wanting.
• Mundane Made Awesome: All Might's solution to dealing with a criminal whose Quirk allows him to break apart into tiny blocks, who was even giving Mirko a hard time? A three-liter bottle of crafting glue. Said villain's Oh, Crap! face at seeing said bottle especially sells it.
• Mundane Utility: Eri has cajoled Midnight into joining her giant chocolate binges, on the promise of rewinding her body to before she ate any and to avoid fattening.
• Mythology Gag:
  • People still can't get the Crawler's name right.
  • Word of God states that Hitoshi Shinsou will still be placed in Class 1-C. The only difference being that, thanks to Dare to Be Badass above, 1-C is now a Hero Course, rather than Gen Ed.
• Never Found the Body: Discussed as All Might is admonishing himself over not making sure that All For One was dead, after his original defeat. Even though he had a perfectly valid reason for being distracted at the time.
  Damn it Toshinori, doesn't matter if your guts are decorating half the goddamned landscape, the Joker isn't dead if you don't have a body!
• Never Gets Drunk: Due to the nature of One For All, even without activating it All Might can drink three men under the table and still keep going. Activated, he is practically immune to most conventional toxins, as his body can burn them out of his system before they can really begin taking effect. It probably doesn't hurt that he's a very large male, two factors that are known to lessen the effects of alcohol.
• Not Distracted by the Sexy: Midnight is both impressed and vexed that All Might's eyes don't even twitch to her cleavage when she unbuttons her shirt. He admits that American Hero Universities have a mandatory class to desensitize heroes towards sexually aggressive or outright exhibitionist villainesses. Internally, he implies that more than one went Full-Frontal Assault, and that many really didn't have the body for their costumes.
• Not Hyperbole: Discussed and Played for Laughs; Mirio briefly gets distracted while listening to Eri explain the Bad Future, wondering if when she said she took "all the Trigger", she's just being emphatic or if she literally took all the remaining Trigger that humanity had stockpiled.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: How All Might feels about the Hero Public Safety Commission, due to their habit of occasionally trying to establish dominance over him with petty, obnoxious nonsense, which would get in the way of him actually being a hero.
• Older Than They Look:
  • Mount Lady initially assumes that Eri is a little girl... which she is, sort of, and when Eri refutes that, Mount Lady assumes that she's a victim of Peter Pan Syndrome, which is this trope as a side effect of a person's quirk. It's subtly implied that Mineta might have a case of this.
  • Thanks to her quirk, Eri can inflict this on other people. While she jokes that it's so that people like Midnight can be younger longer, in reality, she wants to make sure that some of their best fighters are either at their peak longer or don't die of old age (as Nedzu did, before the invasion).
• Old Maid: Mt. Lady refers to Midnight as a "leather-frosted Christmas Cake" while bitterly thinking about having to do a foot fetish meetup.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • All Might gets a few of these:
    • Everyday stuff:
    • Similar to what happened at the USJ in canon, Inko remembered an incident where All Might fought against a bear villain who had put children in danger.
    She shuddered when she remembered that time he fought that horrible bear villain. He hadn't been smiling then... and when he was done, neither was the bear.
    • Due to his preparations for the oncoming alien invasion, All Might starts making a bunch of surprise moves that draw a lot of attention from those more familiar with him, and wonder what is going on. When he pulls the Screw the Rules, I Have Connections! to get David Shields to Japan, his old adoptive brother/sidekick notes he never does that, and understands that whatever is happening, it is serious. Deadly serious.
  • Inko's new happiness and expensive new purchase makes Mitsuki assume her friend is having an affair (and encourages it).
• Orgasmically Delicious:
  • All Might's reaction to eating an enormous barbeque bacon double cheeseburger topped with onion rings makes Midnight joke that it sounds like he's got a girl servicing him under the table. Justified by the fact that this was the first burger he'd been able to eat in six years, and he'd really missed being able to enjoy fast food.
  • Eri's reaction to an ice cream sundae is similar, and for pretty much the same reason: depending on which timeline's perspective you look at it from, the last time she had any ice cream was either eight years ago or never. But since her current body is six, her reaction makes everyone else in the room uncomfortable.
• Paparazzi: A contributing factor to All Might's accidental harem protagonist status is the press refusing to consider that he might want to talk with a woman in private for reasons other than courtship.
• The Paragon: All Might, of course. A significant part of the story is him just showing what being the Symbol of Peace actually means.
• Past-Life Memories:
  • Having received a version of One For All from the future – that he himself used to wield, no less – Izuku is "remembering" moves that he canonically wouldn't develop until much later, such as Full Cowl or Shoot Style.
  • One of Eri's ongoing struggles is with this – she's unsure if she's a little girl who had a whole person's life dumped into her head, or a 27-year-old who's taken over a young girl. In practice, she's splitting the difference and claiming she's fourteen, so that she'll be in Izuku's class.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Nedzu subjects Dupe to some well-deserved Cold-Blooded Torture after he learns of what he did with Midnight in he original timeline from Eri.
• Peggy Sue: Eri going back in time is what starts off the story in the first place.
• Perpetual Poverty:
  • Mirko hates the idea of doing a sponsorship or public relations appearance and has resolved to fund herself solely through the bounties on the crimes she foils. It barely covers her Agency expenses, and said agency consists of two bargain-bin lawyers on retainer, a used Winnebago, and a Secretary who does all her paperwork and chauffeurs her van.
  • Mount Lady regularly causes property destruction that ranges from the tens of thousands to the millions in damage costs. The Hero Public Safety Committee covers the bulk of the expense, but she's still in the red and only getting deeper, no matter how much time and energy she's forced to put into "fund-raising events".
• Phony Degree: Night courses to let people who didn't attend a dedicated hero school qualify to take a hero licensing exam range from quality establishments to fly-by-night con jobs. Mount Lady went to one of the better ones, but it's still noted that the course material was more on the legal and theoretical portion of the job and light on the practical (assuming that anyone seeking to be a hero at that stage in life has already trained their Quirk on their own time), which is a problem for someone like her who has a Quirk that can cause more problems than it solves if not fully mastered and never had the resources to train in its use.
• Playing to the Fetishes: Mount Lady does so in-universe. The author takes as canon her segments in My Hero Academia: Smash!!, where Yu once accidentally stepped on a man while doing hero work and amassed an enormous cult following of foot and crushing fetishists, whom her manager pressures her to cater to with weekly "$50 to step on you" events to stay ahead of her property damage payouts. Yu is disgusted by the creeps and her self-esteem has taken repeated heavy blows from her constantly having to all but prostitute herself.
• Point Ofdivergence: Considering the premise of this fic, this shouldn’t be a surprise.
  • Since All Might’s no longer running on a timer, not only is he at his peak, but also able to go out more. He started to rekindle the old bonds that he pushed away because of his job, willing to take time for himself as Toshinori instead of just being neck-deep in crime all day.
  • Because Izuku didn’t receive One For All from All Might, he begins to acknowledge earlier on that he can’t just be his carbon copy and have to be original himself. In canon, Izuku more or less tried to copy All Might until his arms were broken multiple times and it wasn’t until a diagnosis did he decide to switch up his fighting style.
• The Pollyanna: Bad Future!Inasa never once lost faith that humans would beat back the aliens, even years into the war, with entire countries glassed, the Resistance force decimated, and the pirates already having a Breeding Slave program and interstellar trafficking ring well-established.
• Polyamory: With La Brava's help, the love triangle between Crawler, Pop☆Step, and Makoto is resolved with Pop☆Step and Makoto agreeing to share Crawler. She also teases that the girls' own relationship might be closer than they realize.
• Power Perversion Potential: Mount Lady reveals that, to actually make money, she has to use her Gigantification Quirk to (non-fatally) step on people with the fetishes for it.
• Punch-Clock Hero: Discussed. La Brava is too antisocial and cynical to really believe in saving people, joining All Might purely for Gentle's sake. She quickly grows guilty over her attitude after helping rescue Pop☆Step, and both heroes strongly encourage her to discover a personal motivation to drive her hero work. She finds one in the form of helping other heroes resolve their own relationship dramas.
• Running Gag:
  • Someone being said to have taken all the Trigger.
  • All Might's custom ringtone ruining the mood of a deeply emotionally heavy conversation or introspection.
  • The paparazzi instantly swarming whenever All Might offers help to or has a conversation with a Pro-Heroine in a public bind.
• Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: Tenya and Tensei's parents, the Pro Heroes Virtium and Nitra.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Back-to-back instances, with both times Played for Laughs. Upon discovering a forum thread dedicated to shipping All Might with his own mother, Izuku flees from his computer and bedroom… only to find Mitsuki Bakugo in the living room, jokingly telling Inko to go through with the "affair". Izuku's response?
  He turned one-hundred and eighty degrees on his heel and walked right back into his room.
  "Nope."
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Eri's purpose in coming back.
  • She points out some villains that were either forced into villainy or could be recruited to heroism, such as Gentle, La Brava, and Toga. Not everyone will respond well, as Magne proves when she refuses to make a Heel–Face Turn and is arrested as a result.
  • Mount Lady, in the Bad Future, lost her job due to the rising costs of damage from her Quirk going out of control at times. Eri gives her some advice, and in this timeline, she'll be taking extra steps to prevent that from happening, and All Might has offered her the use of UA facilities to help her fully master her Quirk.
  • Thanks to Eri's words, All Might is starting to rally the scientific community through David Shield to advance mankind's tech and end the technological stagnation that made them vulnerable to the Alien Invasion in the Bad Future.
  • Eri identifies Saiko Intelli, a future villain, and makes an effort to be friends with her (and help her get into the Hero course) so as to avoid her becoming a villain in the future.
  • Twice is hired to work at Might Tower after the source of his problems is resolved by All Might breaking his nose, but he has to attend therapy and he's not working as a pro-hero, but as a janitor. Twice is more than happy to do this.
• Sex Is Good: Midnight in this fic eventually explains that, beyond the self-indulgent exhibitionism of her teen self, she maintains her over-the-top sex icon persona because she specializes in combating sex-trafficking and wants to be a symbol to her rescuees that sex itself is still a positive and fun aspect of life, and they can reclaim ownership of their bodies. It's why she sees her harvesting by Dupe for rape drugs in the past timeline as a worse violation of her self than merely being a Sex Slave.
• Stealth Pun: Mirko has trouble against a villain that deconstructs himself into blocks, and she relies mostly on kicking, a hidden reference to the insult, "I hope you step on a Lego."
• Stepford Smiler: Downplayed with Mirio, but his POV chapter exposes him as riddled with low-key anxiety and mostly trying to emulate the practiced, unflappable confidence of his teachers through his constant cheerful persona. The author describes him as a "sugar glaze" full of cracks and bad habits.
• Super-Empowering: Word of God is that Eri's intent for All for One is to have him strip all the other nasty villains of their Quirks and then force him to splice them onto people she feels would be more deserving and useful with them.
• Take That!:
  • The author's disdain for Midnight's canonical fate of being killed off in canon led to her instead having her Death Faked for You by a sleazy supervillain who kept her on life-support and pumped full of Quirk-boosting drugs so he could create dead clones of her whose bodies he could then harvest for her soporific pheromones to sell as Date Rape drugs.
  • The denouncement of Magne as simply a bad person who happens to be trans and who likes to throw her status as trans around as a weak excuse for her villainy, even being called "an unrepentant psychopath using her identity as a transwoman to provide a freudian excuse to kill and steal without remorse" in chapter 30, seems almost tailor-made to attack the fans of Magne who tout her as a Tragic Villain because of her transwoman status.
  • Chuseki Academy High School is derided in-universe as a classic example of the "Hero Public Service Academies", which All Might (at the least) regards as too focused on a mindless dedication to the ideals of public service over any sort of preparation of the actual realities of hero work, resulting in an average graduating class of "a thousand half-trained C-listers with an average career lifespan of about three years". Learning that this was the school that flunked the Crawler, All Might goes on a short but passionate rant about how it exemplifies everything wrong with the Japanese reverence of conformity.
• There Are No Therapists: Averted. When All Might finds Bubaigawara Jin (AKA Twice), one of the things he suggests is for the man to get therapy, and thinks how easy it will be to swing court-mandated psychiatric care considering Twice's issues.
• This Explains So Much: Intelli Saiko makes this comment about the over-exuberant Inasa when she prods at the crater that he made in the ground from bowing too hard.
• Three Lines, Some Waiting: The three primary focus characters are All Might, Eri, and Izuku. Izuku gets the least amount of focus because as an unlicensed and untrained UA enrollee, he doesn't really have the knowledge, skills, or agency to actually do anything yet.
• Time-Travel Tense Trouble: Eri experiences this occasionally.
• To Be Lawful or Good: The author sees this as Mirio's biggest flaw and the reason why All Might wouldn't want him as a successor; if a person was in danger and the rules got in the way of saving them, Mirio would be far too hesitant to break them as he is naturally law-abiding. All Might wouldn't let the law stop him for a heartbeat, and Izuku only has because as a trainee he can't get away with flaunting regulations as much and is constantly surrounded by people even more anal-retentive than Mirio, and ultimately he still insists on doing the morally right thing each time after ducking them.
  • When All Might has a chance to talk to the Crawler about how he flunked getting into a hero school and is told he failed because he was late for the exam... because he was saving somebody in danger... All Might is appalled, and not surprised in the least to find out the academy in question was one of the so-called “Hero Public Service Academies”.
• Token Evil Teammate: All For One, in the Bad Future. Eri remembers how he would brag about his life of crime and tyranny at every opportunity while helping to fight the aliens. Given that other villains are said to have worked alongside Eri in that timeline, such as Toga, it isn't exactly uncommon. Eri intends to Avert this for the most part by redeeming all the lesser villains she knows of and terminating the major ones after leeching their powers, but for this to happen she will need All for One's cooperation, cementing his place as this trope.
• Took a Level in Idealism: All Might is without a doubt an optimist, but the injury All for One dished out took some of that away, only pushing forward because the world relied on him. Upon Eri reverting his body to its physical prime, his idealism is worn on his sleeve once more as he resolves to do more than fight villains, but also save those in need, hence his recruitment of Koichi and Danjuro into his agency.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • All Might loves American-style junk food, which is justified because One For All requires him to consume massive amounts of calories.
  • Mirko loves carrots, especially carrot cake, and it's one of the very few rabbit-related stereotypes she has no problem with.
  • Tenya reveals to Izuku that his father's Quirk is literally fueled by juice, and this element was hybridized into his son's Quirks, so both Tenya and his brother literally are powered by juice, obligating them to consume it on the regular to fuel their Quirks. A surprised Izuku privately notes that this explains why Tenya's family has so many sponsorship deals with juice companies.
• Trauma Conga Line: Mount Lady was summarily barred from almost every single high school she applied to because no one would trust her to control her Quirk well enough to not destroy the place. When taking the entrance exam for UA, she stressed out during the written test and uncontrollably embiggened, destroying her clothes and injuring several other students. She was so humiliated by the event she abandoned UA altogether, and still has nightmares of that humiliating day years later. Her high school experience in an agricultural school was filled with people wanting to exploit her Quirk for livestock work or arrange Quirk Marriages for her. Her studies at a Hero Night School ^* (in a course that All Might suspects may have been subpar despite her researching their credentials) meant she never received proper training for her Quirk, leading to her trail of accidental destruction, and her ever-growing debt. This led to her doing fetish events for quick payouts to stay ahead of payments^* (with the implication that her manager may in some way be messing with her finances). By chapter 30, Mount Lady is an overworked, self-loathing wreck wondering if the humiliations she's suffered in trying to be a hero are worth it, and when All Might stumbles across one of her "fan meets", she runs crying into the locker room and seriously contemplates committing suicide, before All Might comes in and swears to help her get out of her horrible situation. This gives her a chance to avoid what Eri remembered of her fate from the original timeline, which involved losing her license due to the mounting costs of Quirk-related accidents and then becoming an alcoholic before vanishing from the public eye before the invasion hit.
• Unnecessarily Large Interior: The story actually explains what All Might does with his skyscraper headquarters, which is absurdly large for a one-hero agency. Apparently, the lower levels are a shopping mall, the uppermost levels are his living space, and he also rents out space to other hero agencies.
• Unreliable Narrator: The list of villains for recruitment that Eri gave to All Might was very detailed and informative. It was also written by Toga Himiko, who was biased by her own kinship with the villains and ignored things like crimes committed, justice owed to their victims, and their actual disposition towards redemption without aliens invading. Sir Nighteye lampshades it.
• Unskilled, but Strong: A weird variant with All for One; when he steals other people's Quirks, he gets them at their base strength without any power increases or evolutions that the original user might have unlocked through training. He absolutely could grind them back up to strength, but he'd much rather have a huge Quirk pool where he can mix and match various powers from to form an effective Combination Attack that is as strong as he wants.
• Walking the Earth: Mirko is a cross-country itinerant hero with no fixed agency building. When All Might hears the details of how she operates, he can't help thinking of her as a real-life murderhobo.
• Weirdness Magnet: Discussed during All Might's recruitment of the Crawler, with regards to Koichi having missed his entrance exam because he'd been too busy saving someone.
  All Might: "I know the feeling, I really do. Sometimes it feels like I can't go down to the corner store for some milk and oranges without having to deal with three muggings and a lost kitten..."
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Oddly, Eri has yet to mention Tomura Shigaraki, with regard to her future memories. Whether that has anything to do with him being taken over by All For One in canon is as yet unknown.
• Witty Banter: U.S. Hero collegiate programs have this as a basic course requirement. All Might has a Bachelor's Degree in Tactical Witticism and Repartee.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Any villains that Eri doesn't feel are worth the effort of redeeming or negotiating with, she intends to strip of their Quirks and then execute.
• You Shall Not Pass!: All For One's death in the Bad Future, buying time for Eri to complete her jump to the past.

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