hey! I've seen a bunch of posts on how HPSC is slightly corrupted and all, could you explain if you understand this? They're (die hard villain fans) usually using this as a justification to slam the heroes for raiding the army. I'm quite confused sorry
Iād be more than happy to, friend! I have a strong feeling itās going to be a key detail in the story moving forward so itās good to go back in reviewing everything we know now; plus, it gives me the perfect chance to offer up my theory that ropes in Aizawa, Midnight, and Present Mic. Buckle up, though, because this gets a little long.
The HPSC tells heroes what to do.
The Hero Public Safety Commission is a pocket of the Japanese national government in this universe, sort of like how the FDA is in America.
Itās important to note that HPSC is a separate entity from the heroes. Theyāre the ones giving out licenses, disciplining rouge heroes, overseeing hero training, acting as liaison between heroes and law enforcement, organizing cooperative efforts with multiple heroes across different regions, and managing the general image of heroes with events like the Hero Rankings Billboard.
Heroes have to obey directives given by the HPSC and hero schools have to align with guidelines set by the HPSC, but heroes donāt usually get a say in these decisions and often only get to complain about how things are done and are stuck doing it anyway. If someone is caught heroing without a license or not in hero uniform, you can be fined and/or jailed. If a hero doesnāt keep up with paperwork or runs off and does their own thing they can also be fined and have their license suspended. If a hero goes AWOL or completely flips out they can have their license permanently taken away and be jailed.
Itās actually even more important to note that way heroes are allowed to operate and answer to the government is actually closer in line to a militia than a police force. In fact, while heroes are allowed to make arrests and use their quirks, they are more restricted in what they can and canāt do on their own than the police. If a hero wants to work with other heroes on an investigation, they have to use the private network (administrated by the HPSC) or communicate in person. In the case with the Shie Hassaikai or looking for Kurogiri and the LoV where police cooperation was necessary to carry out the investigation and bring in the gang right away there was no choice but to be transparent with the HPSC.
However, the HPSC doesnāt have to be transparent withĀ the heroes.
They require heroes to give up all their information to keep working as heroes, but they donāt have any accountability for themselves and have notably dodged scrutiny up to this point with public backlash almost always falling on the heroes who have little to no say in how they run things.
Starting back at the beginning of the series with the USJ incident, it understandably garnered massive media attention - it should have. Dozens of unknown, random two-bit villains poured into the most secure, prestigious hero school in all of Japan undetected and resulted in the serious injury of two teachers and could have included the students as well if All Might had not been there to fight and subdue the inhuman monster - the Nomu - who had up to that point had never been seen before.
Itās not unreasonable that UA initially got the blowback from this as it could have been chalked up to complacency causing a lapse in security that the HPSC absolutely wouldnāt have been accountable for. Itās treated like a one-off event and despite investigations going nowhere on it, itās ultimately downplayed and checked out in the background while continuing with the Sports Festival in high spirits. However, things get worse.
After passing their semester exams the Hero Course first-years head off to do practical training in the mountains with a hero team named the Wild Wild Pussycats. Remember, because this is a hero training initiative between a school and a hero team, the HPSC is likely involved at least on some administrative level in regards to granting permission and securing the patch of mountainside to use even if this detail is not acknowledged in the series. Despite efforts to only include the staff, teachers, and heroes involved word somehow still gets out - resulting in more student, hero, and teacher injuries, and most importantly the kidnapping of one of the students.
This can no longer be swept under the rug. A lot happens in the secret hideout raid revealing lots of stuff with the plot, including All-for-Oneās direct involvement, but it doesnāt add anything more to our notes besides the fact UA is once again blamed and heroes are thrown under the bus instead of the organization overseeing them.
Fast forward to the Provisional License Arc. This is the first time we see the HPSC acting explicitly. Itās noted that they passed significantly more students this year than previously.Ā Yokumiru Mera, the tired proctor, is overworked. The HPSC has a reason to urgently pump more students into theĀ āworking forceā now than it had before, though at the moment itās written off as a result of All Mightās retirement.
During the Shie Hassaikai arc the only suspect detail we get is the fact that the raid on compound is inexplicably compromised, and somehow the yakuza knew the heroes and police were coming. Weāll come back to this and to the leaks in UA again later.
Skipping the remedial courses and school festival arc, we get to the Pro Hero Arc. Big lights, pomp and circumstance, and a massive powerful Nomu attack that nearly kills the freshly crowned #1 Hero. From this point forward, what we get of the HSPC is mainly through Hawks and his experience with him. After the fight, we get a flashback of the President of the HSPC herself telling him to ignore civilian casualties in his mission to infiltrate the LoV, that he has to do it solo, and that he canāt tell anyone. Briefly in the next chapter he says that despite his objections he canāt actually tell them no.
Did a government agency just tell a hero to secretly get in with the villains no matter what, and when he objects and asks whether heās just supposed to ignore collateral damage in the process is told,Ā āYou can and you willā?! (Thatās a verbatim quote from chapter 192.) I thought this agency was supposed to hep people and keep them safe!
We get smatterings of interactions between Hawks and the HPSC, and though we donāt get anything from there side weāre getting that every questionable or deplorable thing Hawks does or needs to get on the LoVās good side is acknowledged and endorsed by the HPSC.Ā āIām in contact with the shady guy who loosed that monster in the middle of the city with no warning. He wants me to kill the other top hero who just recovered and to join the definitely-dangerous doomsday cult, and maybe THEN heāll let me in on whatās going on.ā Ok, sure. Nothing morally questionable about any of that...
Jump to chapter 267. Up to this point, this note about Hawksā past has been hinted at, but is here finally confirmed with a chilling detail. Kids who enter hero work may get special coaching by their families when theyāre young, but the threshold for entering formal government-regulated training isnāt until 14/15 years of age in the last few years of their education. Chapter 267 shows a little Keigo Takami no older than about 8, at best, being told by the HPSC that he doesnāt get to call himself by his own name anymore. From now on, heās going to be a hero, and only a hero, and itās going to long and hard. Back in 192, two mysterious figures promise the same boy, shown at the same age, that his family will be taken care of.
Whatever circumstances led Keigoās family to end up in the situation they did, they accepted an offer from a government agency, the HPSC specifically - you can see their headquarters in the flashback - to take away their very young son, take away his identity (and implicitly his family), and groom him to be government tool for the rest of his life - a commitment he had no true say in and that he could not understand at the time.
Endeavor works with the HPSC regularly as all heroes have to, but his relationship with them and what theyāll let him get away with gets put into greater question the longer we look at it. He turned to eugenics to create a hero he couldnāt be and surpass All Might for the sole purpose of satisfying his own ego. He bought a girl from her family and forced her to have his kids, then subjected those kids to cruel training - passing over each one until he got to one he felt he could work with -, beat his wife as well, and some kind of action he was involved in lead to the death of his oldest son. While the domestic abuse could be hidden, the death of his child cannot. Whatās more, shortly after (very shortly if timelines add up), his youngest son received a permanent burn scar on the heat-resistant side of his face and his wife was locked away in a mental institution for a decade.
And the HPSC never bats an eye. They could take away his license. They could call the police. They could have exposed him to the public or at least ordered an investigation. But they didnāt. On some level they knew, and they did nothing.
But it might be even worse.
I skipped over this detail chronologically, but itās the linchpin for just how corrupt the HPSC might be if all this lines up. Looking at the Endeavor Agency Arc, we get a seemingly random confrontation with a guy called Starservant (chapter 243) who prattles off a prophecy about the Dark Lord returning and his Dark Stars conspiring against humanity which will bring the world to ruin. He calls out Endeavor specifically as the shining light that beckons the darkness, but this sounds an awful lot like the deranged wailing of some crazy old man, right?
Letās jump over an entire series now to the spin-off serial Vigilantes. This series takes place in the same universe at an earlier point in the timeline of the main story - and take an extra little note that thereās an underlying subplot about unusual drugs meant to enhance quirks (that often result in mutating the user) and that someone may be using them to clandestinely run experiments on humans from the shadows.Ā
In chapter 59 we get flashbacked to Eraserhead, Midnight, and Present Micās childhood experiences at UA, and weāre also introduced to Oboro Shirakumo - their fellow classmate and dear friend. We get a few chapters establishing their relationships and their goals and dream for the future until chapter 63 where things make a drastic turn in tone. On what should be a routine hero training exercise as third-year seniors a giant, monstrous villain shows up and attacks while the UA kids are escorting a class of preschoolers around town.
In the scuffle, though Aizawa is able to single-handedly come out victorious, in the fight and debris Shirakumo is struck in the head by falling concrete as he tries to lead the children to safety and dies on the scene. Go back to main series, chapter 254-255, the villain Kurogiri is detained but the police are having no luck questioning him. They get a sliver of a lead and call in Present Mic and Eraserhead to interrogate him, and itās confirmed that Kurogiri was a human experiment of Doctor Ujiko - the mad scientist bio-engineer responsible for the Nomu and outspokenly faithful servant of All-for-One - created from the corpse of their dearly departed Oboro.
Hereās the kicker, though, in Japan they donāt often bury their dead. Funerals next to never include an open casket - the loved one is cremated first, their ashes placed on an funeral shrine with their picture, and the loved ones mourn there. That means Ujiko needed to get to the body before it was cremated - which requires some fast work; but thatās not even the worst of it. Jumping one last time to chapter 270, Ujiko recognizes Mic as a friend of Shirakumo and boldly admits the entire time he was after Aizawa for his quirk.
That attack more than 10 years ago was premeditated. This goes back a long ways. How did he find this information - about their quirks and their movements and where to find them? How did Ujiko get the body out of the morgue without anyone catching him? Could it be the same way his fellow servants of All-for-One were able to get into the USJ? And the Training Camp? And the Yakuza raid? All-for-One has a lot of connections for his faithful servants to move about freely in this world of heroes despite every effort being take to stop them.Ā
Somehow, these shining lights can never seem to outrun the dark no matter how hard they try, as if thereās a conspiracy against them. But a conspiracy of that level would have to come all the way from the top! If you wanted to get poetic about it, you could even say the stars themselves are conspiring against us. But that old man was crazy, right? If he wasnāt crazy - if he was right at all - then no matter what way you slice it:
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