As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Fridge Brilliance
- Why does Bakugou think Izuku is a habitual manipulator and gaslighter? Because Izuku uses his notebooks to plan strategies to try and subvert the abuse he faces from Bakugou and his classmates. Bakugou read them and only saw the attempt to subvert Bakugou's intention to hurt Izuku, and never comprehended that a child shouldn't have to try to manipulate someone into not hurting them.
- There are more elements from Cain and Abel that are at play then just the title itself. In the original story, it's implied that God showed preference to Abel over Cain because Abel was sincere with his offerings and always sacrificed his best lambs to the lord, whereas his brother was not as honest and only offered meager offerings to keep most of his crops for himself. Izuku had the upmost sincerity in becoming a hero who helps people and would sacrifice his own safety to protect those in trouble, thus earning him All Might's approval. In comparison, Bakugou's heroic resolve was hollow as he was only thinking of himself and what suited him best. Not to mention that he had a habit of lying out of fear of what others thought of him, just like the wicked brother.
- In the end of the biblical tragedy, God places a mark on Cain so that no one would kill him on sight during the rest of his miserable existence. Bakugou would receive his own mark after his own murder attempt only so that no hero school would accept him for what he's done.
- The practical exam serves not only as a literal test for who's good enough to get into UA, but narratively as a Secret Test of Character for Katsuki, as it challenges all of the flaws that All Might tried to point out so Katsuki could work on them.
- Early on in the story, Katsuki and All Might talk about the virtue of power in hero work. To prove the point about how much better he is, Katsuki throws some of the beach junk on the ground and obliterates it into smithereens. All Might instead argues that he has now made the situation worse, because that level of force wasn't necessary and now the pollution is in much smaller and more numerous pieces. Similarly, in the practical exam, Bakugou doesn't listen to the instructions and insists on obliterating the robots even when he doesn't have to. His destruction poses a threat to the other examinees, who have to shield themselves from his blast radius.
- All Might asks him why he can't just be happy with developing himself and his own successes, and why he has to be the absolute best. Once it appears, Bakugou focuses on the Zero Pointer to the exclusion of all else, unaware it's All for Nothing since there are no points to be gained from it and he's most definitely not saving anyone.
- All Might points out that Bakugou doesn't know his limits. On the beach he goes for the heaviest and hardest debris just to prove his superiority, despite not having enough strength to move them. This same mentality nearly gets him killed by the Zero Pointer, who has him helpless under its palm by the time the exam is called.
- All Might asks why his reaction to finally being called out is to cry, emphasizing Bakugou's lack of accountability. The entire exam, Bakugou blames every possible mistake he suspects he made on Izuku, despite Izuku being in an entirely different testing ground.
- In the last scene, Katsuki says that he sold his All Might merchandise but it didn’t get him enough money to do more than replace the posters, "which would be another waste, [as] there weren’t any other heroes worth buying merch for." Katsuki never admired heroes or heroics as a concept, he just admired All Might—because All Might was "the best."
- In the last scene, the story narrates: "He got a test back with less than a perfect score for the first time. Not because it wasn’t perfect, but because the teachers wanted to punish [Katsuki] for not getting into UA and cutting off any glory they could mooch on. It’s all that stupid fucking Deku’s fault." Thing is, even if the reality of whether the work was "perfect" is unclear under Bakugou's Unreliable Narration, in that one instance, he's probably at least partially right. Bakugou was the primary instigator of Izuku's bullying. He spearheads it, directs the class focus on Izuku, and the class plays Follow the Leader with whatever new bullying tactic he's come up with. When the other kids in the class appear to be close to a Heel Realization after the discrimination awareness assembly, it's Bakugou who encourages them to doubt the sincerity of All Might's words and helps them talk themselves into ignoring it, like the class' own shoulder devil. The teachers did little to nothing to stop him because they didn't think Izuku was worth putting black marks on their "future Hero's" record. When Bakugou gives Izuku third-degree burns and effectively pushes Inko and Toshinori to withdraw Izuku from the school entirely, the staff simply gives Bakugou three "sick days" because of his "quirk accident." But then Katsuki didn't get into UA, Izuku did. And so not only did Katsuki "fail them" by not returning on all the privileges they'd given him, but they actually could have been a school with hero alumni... if they hadn't destroyed any positive relationship they could have had with Izuku for the sake of Bakugou's presumed Hero career. Who knows if they actually deliberately misgraded Bakugou's work or if they're actually grading it accurately for the first time, but he's probably right that they're blaming their mistakes on him.
- Bakugou's scapegoating of Izuku for his own issues is carefully written to mirror the specifics mentioned for how their society scapegoats Quirkless people. Through Bakugou's class and teachers, we get a good look at how any society might go about discriminating against a minority whose existence highlights the flaws of their society, with the basic mentality on view able to be summed up as: "it's not that we're responsible for making our world unjustly [insert demographic]-centric, it's that they shouldn't even be part of our society anyways, because they're useless and bad." That Bakugou copes with his own insecurities by scapegoating Izuku is obvious. The cruel brilliance comes in with the portrayal of how Bakugou and his outside world feed each other; the unstable and cruel Bakugou encourages those around him to abuse Izuku, and the story takes careful pains to show that they in turn give him the narratives by which he can get away with it.
- The culture portrayed in the story treats the Quirkless as indistinguishable from the Quirkless people who discriminated against Quirked people at the Dawn of Quirks—this despite the Quirkless today having no closer relationship to past events or sides of conflicts than people with Quirks, because Quirklessness appears to be effectively a random disability and everyone alive in the present is descended from the Quirkless people of the past. This is seen in how Bakugou questions how All Might doesn't understand what "they" do to "normal people," using the present tense but citing only the Dawn of Quirks (and movies about Quirkless serial killers. More on that below). It's also seen in Bakugou's classmates, who use the persecution that some of their distant ancestors faced for having Quirks as justification to abuse Quirkless people in the present, implying as if modern Quirkless people have inherited some deserved karma from the past generations—even though the classmates themselves, given their generational distance from the Dawn of Quirks, must logically be just as descended as Izuku from both people with Quirks and people without them.
- It's briefly mentioned that their society does not have many higher learning opportunities for Quirkless people. One of Bakugou's self-justifications is that Izuku doesn’t deserve the ones that exist.
- Along with displacing past divisions onto present minorities, their society also scaremongers about the Quirkless, apparently 'producing movies "like every year" about Quirkless serial killers that Bakugou claims are "based on a true story." Perhaps unsurprisingly, when Bakugou can't convince All Might to abandon Izuku simply because he's Quirkless, Bakugou begins to villify Izuku in order to be able to give more reasons why Izuku should be abandoned. This mirrors the implicit purpose of those movies: to give the public reasons not to question the treatment of Quirkless people.
- There is enough to imply that many Quirkless people end up in sex work simply because there are few other avenues with which to make a living. Bakugou outright weaponizes this against Izuku to sexually harass him and get away with it, with the Principal's words on the matter still implying the possibility that the photographs Bakugou took against Izuku's will are Izuku's "mistake."
Fridge Horror
- While the author labels this story as Katsuki being "out-of-character", many commenters stated that Cain!Bakugo is a very possible outcome for his canon self.
- While this applies to all of Katsuki's harassment, Word of God specifically implies
that Katsuki downplays his sexual harassment of Izuku to fit his own rationalizations and narratives. If this is how the events are described when filtered to paint Bakugou in a light of his choosing, how much worse was his actual behavior? How much abuse and disturbed behavior do we just not hear about because Katsuki doesn't acknowledge it? - Regardless if Katsuki accepted Shigaraki's offer to join his Legion of Doom or not, the grim leader would have already received more than enough info to work with thanks to the explosive blonde's postings about All Might's Quirk and weaknesses.
- Even if Katsuki turns Shigaraki down and never does another criminal act in his life, he might still have just signed his own arrest warrant for his role in Shigaraki's actions. Katsuki released compromising information that will likely directly lead to criminal action against the person he just doxxed, and released more information via direct messaging with the criminal. This was information that he understood was dangerous and released specifically to hurt Toshinori and Izuku. If he's ever linked to Shigaraki, there goes any chance of a normal civilian life Bakugou has left—especially given his criminal history with Shigaraki's intended victims.
- Izuku comments on how his teachers and peers will never overcome their Quirkist beliefs in spite of All Might's efforts towards bringing awareness to Quirkless discrimination and how to stop it. The Aldera staff will most likely continue practicing their toxic beliefs by either excusing the terrorization of future Quirkless students or grooming students with potentially strong/flashy Quirks just so they can ride on their coattails, creating a new Cycle of Violence.
- Imagine what All For One would have done to him had Bakugou succeeded in murdering Izuku, thus destroying OFA and denying him it forever.
