i also get annoyed at the fairly common assumption in the fandom that monomas quirk "doesnt change his body" or that hes 100% incapable of copying mutant quirks as its like. loosely implied by his use of bakugos quirk (which requires mutated sweat glands to work) AND visually confirmed that he can via eris horn!
but one thing that does interest me about it is the fact that it IS a somewhat common interpretation of his quirk, despite, as far as i know, never having come up in the series at all. other than the typical game of telephone in fandom headcanons, my running theories for how exactly it started is some combinations of these:
A) the sports festival (and monomas intro) was pretty soon after the usj arc, which explicitly called out mutant quirks being a weakness of aizawa's quirk. fans may have drawn comparisons between erasure and copy being quirks that interact with other quirks, and then came to the conclusion that monoma couldn't copy mutant quirks since aizawa couldnt erase them.
B) also during the sports festival, he doesn't copy any visually mutant quirks. Yes he copied explosion, which has mutated sweat glands, but being an invisible mutation its easy to forget about. and yes he did also copy hardening which changed his body, but its a transformation quirk. both easy to write off as not altering his body via the actual copy quirk.
B 2) elaborating on that point, there just arent many examples of monoma copying quirks at all in the series, and most of which we do see are considered emitters. and then when he did copy eris quirk, he only had the horn for a few panels and it was paired with an (also often misunderstood imo) explanation of why he cant use certain quirks, which was what most fans latched on to in regards to his quirk.
C) im fairly certain that somewhere there was something written that classified copy as an emitter quirk, which would give the impression that it doesnt change his body. however the classification system is pretty loose in general and as mentioned, is directly contradicted by what we see in canon
D) in general, people like to give their faves powerups and their least faves more weaknesses, and monoma just wasnt a fan favorite for most of the run. it goes hand in hand with the also common depictions of monoma being weaker/worse at fighting than he is in canon. like there are so many fics ive come across that make him incapable of things he literally did on page/screen and its pretty often coupled with making him a generally incompetent ass for plot reasons. dont even get me started on how many fics switch out shinso to make monoma do the hallway scene before the sports festival instead! but thats more characterization then quirk lol
anyways that got long oopsie daisies. In Summary: Theres no canon backing for the common fanon idea that monoma cant copy mutations/change his body, but i can see how it possibly took root.
(since youve gotten this far: have a little headcanon! copy should technically be considered a transformation quirk by the (albeit flawed) quirk classification system. however, due to emitter type quirks being most common, thats most of what monoma copied in his first few months/years of having his quirk and therefore what copy got classified as. Monoma, being interested in quirks due to his own, learned of his misclassification fairly early and tried to make his doctor change it. the doctor however did not want to admit that a kid understood quirks better than they did and basically locked his quirk registration as emitter out of spite. by the time monoma could have changed it, hes learned enough about quirks to be more knowledgeable and opinionated about quirk science + laws that he decided that changing his registration to transformation type was pointless and there are far more interesting things to complain about regarding those classifications as a whole. any classmate who asks will get an inescapable lecture about this and whatever other quirk science has gotten on his nerves lately. and yes, he has presentations prepared.)
I never considered how one of the reasons for the fandom's perception of Monoma's quirk could be the comparison between his and Aizawa's quirks, but I can see how that paired with the little screen time he has might've made people forget/misinterpret how his quirk works. For the thing on Explosion working with mutated sweat glands –that secrete nitroglycerin-like sweat– I honestly thought this was pretty common knowledge, considering how Bakugou is the most popular character.
Didn't know about Copy possibly being classified as an emitter type, which like you say doesn't really make sense. It can be an emitter, if the copied quirk also is, but it can also be transformation. The one that trips up fans the most are accumulation quirks, which he can also copy, he just doesn't get the original user's already accumulated energy.
Your point about fans giving power-downs to characters they don't like is one I did notice and fully agree with. I'll also add that, for Monoma specifically, most of his fanbase also weakens him considerably, even completely disregarding canon and common sense. That's actually the reason why I don't interact much with monoma/mnshn fans, despite my blog being dedicated to them lol. I wasn't aware there were fics that switch them for that scene that's so ???
Anyways, I love that headcanon!! I always imagined that, due to the nature of his own quirk, he'd be very interested –and opinionated– in quirk mechanics, laws, history, theories, science, etc. And he's 100% the type to make presentations to argue on his opinions. He'd even pull out whole folders filled with academic papers and essays of his own to back up his arguments.
gummygunk
tangentwithtanner
turnnoffyourmind
gracieabrams
2087
izzy806
areudirty
