for pez dispenser debris, has the third sports festival not happened yet or did it happen and it just wasn’t as cool as the second one
Ehhh, this one is kind of a loose thread I’ve been leaving open to do something with if I come up with something cool, but in my mind I’ve sort been playing with the idea that Class 3-A didn’t compete their third year.
The rest of the year didn’t want to compete with them for reasons of personal safety (they were all completely insane and known biters) and the school didn’t want to let them compete for reasons of legal liability. Literally every single year they had competed, these kids had tried to kill each other on live tv. Izuku and Todoroki had tried to murder specifically each other twice. Uraraka put Bakugou in a medically induced coma after their second match. Every single year they cut it closer to a fatal injury, and considering the year before involved a medically induced coma, they thought their luck might just run out the third time around.
There were also safety concerns about just how much information they were letting out about these kid’s Quirks. Before, it wasn’t as much of an issue? The UA sports festival was big, don’t get me wrong, but it usually resulted in the high performers getting recognized by a few more dedicated heroics fans for a few days after the event. Other heroics students looked at them so they could kick their ass in exams, but villains weren’t exactly bothered enough by heroic students to actually study them up in advance of their debut. But for Class 3-A? Villains were watching them.
And the Sports Festival just didn’t do for them what they needed it to anymore. It was meant to be an advertisement of their ability. A way to say “hey, look out for me,” and get agencies, the press, and the public primed for their careers. Class 3-A doesn’t need help with any of that. They are already too famous. But Class 3-B and the rest of their year? They could use a time to shine.
Class 3-A sort of sucks the fucking air out of the fucking room, honestly. Especially for Class B. Like. They are part of the most famous generation of heroes to come out of UA. And they are the less impressive, mostly unknown class. The rest of the school sort of has mixed feelings about Class 3-A. They’re proud of them, but it sucks being their classmates.
There’s nothing to be done about it. Class 3-A has just taken way too big a position in the public eye. The school could put the entire year on with them as usual and give them no special treatment, and the news would still only give a shit about what 3-A did. They’re actively detracting from their classmate’s abilities to get noticed, because everyone’s too busy fawning over one class out of eight.
The teachers also had to have a serious conversation about how including Class 3-A legitimately introduced concerns of societal destabilization. Aizawa had to take some deep breaths to will his way through that conversation.
Again, after their second year, the public started considering Class 3-A a source of new hope—with Izuku at the forefront as the next symbol of peace. A huge amount of that and to do with the miracle they pulled off handling the Tartarus Prison Break. But specifically Izuku came out of the entire mess with a lot of global hope riding on his shoulders.
He was the new unbeatable hero. The world had lost the guy who could be counted on to win any fight when All Might retired. But there was Izuku, shiny and bouncy and fresh to fight, whose Quirk was everything All Might’s was and more. And he had won fights that during Yokohama that no one thought he would win.
Taking down the Fatal Five was a big part of it. I have all this lore built up in my mind around them, these fanfictions villains who only exist in my head and are only based off canon in the loosest sense. It’s so dramatic in my head. There’s espionage. There’s betrayal. There’s gay love. I can’t get into that it’s too far afield. But when they were active, people were legitimately afraid of going outside. They were the only villains that All Might noticeably relied on help to defeat, because Sir Nighteye was so fundamental to their final capture.
Defeating them without All Might seemed more likely than defeating All for One and the League, but not by much. It was expected to take months, if not years, to recapture them again. These were villains who were credited with hundreds of fatalities—and the confirmed injuries clocked at over a thousand. They were city destroyers during their first run. People were absolutely fucking terrified of them doing it all a second time.
Izuku and Mirio pulled off an absolute Hail Mary play with their takedown. No one thought they would win, including them. They couldn’t let these guys go without a fight, but they also thought that they probably weren’t making it out the other side of this match. They weren’t aiming to die, but that just made this a kamikaze where they hoped to survive the plane crash. They went into this fight expecting to both die.
They understood that they lost this match up 99 times out of 100. But they told themselves that they just needed to find the one time they won and make it tonight. And just barely, through a lot of luck, they managed it. People lost their minds when news broke that the Fatal Five had been defeated by two teenagers.
And as stated in a different post, Izuku gets primary credit for taking down all of them because most of the fight happened where no one could see it and people love to discredit Mirio’s abilities. Not everyone thought that way, but the ones that did? They thought it was a sign Izuku would be better than All Might. Izuku did it without help. Even though, objectively, this was very much a two man job.
It was enough to make the world start hoping that Izuku was their new unbeatable hero. He had already won fights that should be unwinnable. So if he could beat the Fatal Five, then maybe he can beat every other opponent he faces. Maybe he can replace All Might.
What happens if that kid fucking loses a low stakes sparring match?
As it stood, Izuku, Todoroki, and Bakugou were considered the most likely to win the third year’s festival. But the other kids were fantastic, and they had a shot still even if it wasn’t as good. So how does the world react if some random fucking kid in class b manages an underwhelming victory after Izuku fumbles it?
Izuku’s existence in pez is basically that wad of napkins you wedge under the short leg of a wobbly table to try and make it stay level but like. For global social stability. Class 3-A rolling up to Yokohama and throwing hands with a bunch of adult murderers and somehow fucking winning is the reason why this Japan isn’t at the Refugees In UA And Chaos In The Streets portion of canon. They were so sparkly and inspiring and heroic that the entire country unified around loving and believing in them and shit stabilized. And everyone stopped freaking out about what they were going to do without All might because the next one was already in the pipe.
So what the fuck do you do if your new unbeatable mega celebrity hero fucking eats it at his friendly school sparring match and proves to everyone that he is, in fact, fallible on live TV? What if the entire class has an off day and does poorly, thereby undermining the current reason the world has for hope?
You’ve got a class that’s so unprecedentedly important that the school has to field phone calls from world leaders feeling out what the situation is with the ol’ sports festival. The fuck do you do about it?
It became almost unfair to the other students to make them fight against Class A, which is what Present Mic said and immediately got both Aizawa and Vlad King violently mad at him.
Aizawa, because he has started to profoundly resent the implication that his kids somehow need to atone to the rest of the school. Admittedly they’re all completely insane and do bite but that’s unrelated to why the rest of the school resents him so it’s a nonissue. Fuck everyone, it’s not their fault that adults have tried to kill them since like their fourth day of school, and UA has never handed out participation medals. If they wash out against his kids it’s because they just weren’t as good.
Vlad, meanwhile, was angry at the implication that his kids weren’t as good as Class A and needed to have them taken out of the running entirely to even stand a shot. Fuck you.
There was a lot of yelling.
But Mic just meant that it was unfair to pit them against Class A in the eyes of the public. Like, hey kids, let’s have a good ol’ fashioned competition for fun, do your best, but just as a reminder that if Midoriya from class a doesn’t win then it may legitimately destabilize the nation. Yeah the ministry of finance called he’s worried about the economic ramifications. But don’t worry, because no one really thinks you’ll beat him anyway. Now let’s all get out there and have fun.
It just felt like it set everyone up to fail while giving villains more footage to find potential weaknesses with. The school decided to just cut them from the competition, which Aizawa shouted at a lot of people about, even though he wanted them cut when the conversation started. He wanted the world to have less of them to chew at, and then he got mad at the implication that his kids somehow would be a problem if they got to participate in a school wide event. He talked himself all the way around to the other side out of spite.
They told Class A that they had lost privileges to the sports festival because they had repeatedly tried to murder each other and also everyone else on live TV, which was fair, really. The school didn’t trust them to not almost kill each other again, which was a concern Class A understood and agreed with, because they were totally going to do that. Plus Ultra, Sensei.
I think they let the kids do like an escape room or something just so they wouldn’t be totally left out, which they ended up televising to quell some of the backlash after they announced Class 3-A would not be participating in that year’s sports festival. It didn’t endear them to the rest of their classmates, because Class 3A Tries To Leave A Room In Groups of Five With Only Marginal Success turned out to be more popular than the sports festival. It bred some resentment amongst the other students, because to them, it seemingly confirmed that the faculty thought of them as lesser than class 3-a.
In the school’s defense, they did have concerns about someone actually murdering the other on live tv and having to deal with the liability. Through sheer luck of the fucking draw, Izuku and Bakugou had never had to do a one on one match with each other for two years running. They couldn’t possibly be that lucky a third time, and someone would die, and the stadium would probably be destroyed in the process, and bystanders would die, and what would they say in the lawsuit? Oh, we didn’t know they’d do that? They try to do that every time. They thought that doing a nice escape room involving no physical contact whatsoever would prevent injuries.
There were still injuries.
