[the following bio has been preserved for posterity] sparks is the name and memes is the game (they/them) im a top tier shitposter and my life is a joke - I'm an artist and a writer [rest-in-rip on ao3]Â main: @emberglowfox
since i feel bad dusting off this blog i will add on that last note. since it has been like actually five goddamn years i can say with some level of security that leviathan will likely never be completed. i’ve tried off and on to continue it in recent years but the passion just isn’t there anymore.Â
frankly, the main hurdle with it is one i ran into again while trying to hand it off or at least summarize what might have happened: there was no plan. i started leviathan freshly 14 with even less experience with longform writing than the modicum i have now. i started it because i wanted to write a bnha fanfiction, not because i had a story to tell. everything was made up on the fly. towards the end, i did actually start planning major story beats, but only that: none of the track to get there, or the emotional elements that i think were what made the story so well-liked.Â
and, in all my young teenage brilliance, i didn’t record most of what i did come up with, so most of what didn’t get recorded in discord dms or the occasional onenote page has been lost to time.
this is kind of a long-winded way of apologizing, because i know a lot of people were at one time invested in the story, and would like to at least know how it was supposed to end if they didn’t get to actually see it. i’ve been on the other end of that before, and i know it’s not super fun. maybe some day i’ll figure it out (i genuinely would like to), but i’ve mostly moved on to other things, so i wouldn’t bet any significant amount on it. i am sorry.
as i said in the end notes on the actual fic: all the support and the community that sprung up around this fic genuinely changed my life. thank you all. i wish i could have seen it through.
but if you want to know what might have happened, i do have this.
actually, i may as well type this up now, since if i say "eh i'll do it later" it'll probably never happen at this point, so.
like i've said in many posts, i don't know a lot of what would have Specifically Happened in leviathan. i started writing it with no plan, and only decided to come up with concrete things as time went on. most of what i wrote down has been lost to time and digital decay; i no longer have access to the high school onenotes and sketchbooks i planned a lot in. but i still remember some things, even now. so let's discuss.
THE DEAL WITH BIT: bit was "retro's kid". he'd been kidnapped at a young age to be used as a living battery for retro's inventions, which he would use for, well, villainous purposes. bit had discovered an ability to override inventions he was powering. retro had wanted bit back to see his full capabilities. literally... i think the next chapter of the fic would have been shigaraki settling debts, and sending kurogiri to kidnap bit. izuku would have jumped through the portal after him, getting both of them captured. kurogiri, in a hurry and frustrated, would have ended up giving them both over to retro, then leaving. the subsequent sequence would have involved izuku panicking and accidentally revealing to bit that he was the leviathan. bit would have said that he'd known, or at least suspected. they'd then later team up to take down retro, with izuku forced to re-awaken the parts of the leviathan he'd been surpressing. bit would have served as... something of an anchor for the rest of the story. the only person who knew, but bizarrely (to izuku), didn't blame him for any of it. this would have been a point of contention between them, at times.
sometime after this, blade (who lost an arm to the leviathan) would have been released from the hospital. he would have gone to the league of villains to share his discovery that izuku was the leviathan, startling them. all for one would have found this incredibly interesting and decidede to observe izuku closely going forward before making a move. (shigaraki and kurogiri are pissed. they JUST HAD HIM. and they gave him to RETRO, who FUCKED IT UP.)
UA SPORTS FESTIVAL
really the only thing i remember about this was that izuku was effectively immune to shinsou's quirk. his constant mental battle made him essentially a psychological brick wall; he could shrug shinsou off like it was nothing, to shinsou's frustration.
he would have allowed shinsou to mind control him during the actual SF fight round, losing early on. he'd never really properly explain why to shinsou, frustrating him. i think shinsou ends up being the one to fight todoroki and them having A Moment? because izuku is really not the one for like. the evil quirk conversation, ha. todoroki comes to some revelations about his quirk and his personhood, but still lets shinsou win to stick it to his dad. this is... kind of bad for shinsou's plan of not showing people how his quirk works, but he's 14 and riding that attention high for all it's worth.
INTERNSHIPS / VS STAIN ARC
don't remember like. most of this. but izuku would have interned with ryuko tatsuma (the dragon shapeshifter lady) in hopes that her quirk worked a little like his, but would have come up empty. he would have been in hosu for the attacks, and joined iida and todoroki in taking down stain. that fight would have been pretty brutal, with stain fascinated by izuku. he'd give his whole who deserves to be a hero spiel, which izuku would have torn to shreds, ending with the lines,
"but above all, there's on reason i know that your method of choosing who deserves to be a hero is wrong."
"and why is that?"
"you chose me."
^ taken from ye olden discord beta chat.
FOREST TRAINING ARC
i think this was where the mall sequence was? regardless, at the mall, shinsou is approached by shigaraki, who would grin at him and say some incomprehensible things about him being a "god tamer" and "friend to the most powerful monster in the world". he'd mention this later to midoriya, which sends him into a paranoia spiral.
and then there's all the forest training stuff, izuku is incredibly off-kilter the whole time and kind of manic, and of couuuurse he would have been the one targeted by the league of villains and kidnapped out from under everyone's noses. they panic.
after getting everyone (that they have) home, and contacting authorities (including my lovely naomasa <3 miss you baby) they would have gotten a video call from an unknown number. all for one would have spoken to them all directly, before cutting to a video feed of izuku in an enormous cell, where he would have been forced to activate his quirk, revealing him to be the leviathan to UA staff and some authorities. all for one would have thanked the heroes kindly for holding him for a while, and said that he'll take it from here.
all for one would then have taken the leviathan quirk from izuku. however, when he'd attempt to use it himself, he'd find it only a mild shapeshifting quirk; the ability to turn a little lizard-y and cough some sparks, but nothing more. out of fascination, he'd give the quirk back to izuku, and find the usual monster awaiting. he'd take and give izuku various different quirks, and find all of them effectively superpowered out of control. fascinated, he'd leave izuku with the leviathan quirk and send his scientists in to do some tests.
the following revelation would be twofold. all for one's scientists would discover that izuku's body was constantly maintaining a high density of [insert chemical here]-- the same active ingredient in the drug trigger. inko midoriya would also reveal to someone (maybe an undercover operative?) that she'd been a victim of the trigger attacks (from BNHA Vigilantes, which I loved at the time, ha) while she was pregnant with izuku. the effects of trigger on a pregnant person had never been even considered, let alone documented. the result was a child with a permanently trigger-ified quirk that went out of control the second it manifested. they tell izuku this and he's like ...oh.
HIDEOUT RAID ARC
the heroes are obviously assembling to raid afo's hideout POSTHASTE, with the heavy awareness of Just How Badly This Could Go hanging heavy over their heads. like canon, the kids also decide to go help and rescue izuku, joined by bit! who is laughingly Extremely Wary about the whole thing, and kind of vaguely implying that they should be ready for something bad. they yell at him for being a pessimist. he stays quiet.
i don't remember exactly how this went in canon but the opening at least would be similar enough to that. Big Fight, kids manage to rescue izuku, whatever. then they look up, and afo is kind of mopping all might.
izuku would have tried to run back into the fray. shinsou would gone after him to stop him, but izuku would have shaken him off, revealed himself to be the leviathan (with the air of a goodbye), and gone full-transformation. this would have revealed his identity to shinsou and his other ua friends, with bit there to explain a little bit to try and calm them down.
izuku, working together with the leviathan for the first time and thus able to actually kind of control himself, would have been able to work together with all might to just fucking smash afo. battle of the gods, in a way. all for one would have died here (at all might's hands. no more grief for the kiddo.) and izuku ends a fight conscious and in control of himself, for once.
after everything, izuku is taken into custody (bit is VOCALLY against this but overridden) and placed in a holding cell with quirk suppressants (which is weirdly nice! it shouldn't be! but it is!) where he talks to naomasa. he comes clean about everything, including what he's learned about the permanent trigger enhancement. naomasa is APPALLED, and is like, sorry? you've been on trigger constantly since you were four? and izuku's like yyyeaahhh haha. and naomasa is ... frankly horrified, by all of it, but promises to get him help.
and they do! izuku goes on quirk suppressants, since there's no real... trigger suppressant in existence, yet (they have to play with the dosage a bit). they also kind of realize "the leviathan" (the one in izuku's head) is... basically how his brain has learned to conceptualize what's happening to him. and even then, the leviathan isn't evil; it's just overwhelmed, in pain, and scared. izuku comes to terms with all of this, which combined with the medication, makes it possible for him to comfortable control his quirk for the first time in his life.
he tells his mom everything, she's horrified, they cry about it. he tells his friends everything, they forgive him. he talks to bit. he even talks to blade in jail, i think. but he goes forward with an actual support system, and does end up being the underground hero he always wanted to be, with a focus on kids and people with "out of control" quirks who people want to write off.
misc emotional beats:
shinsou would have assumed izuku's repression of the leviathan (post USJ) to be an attempt to stop reminding them about the leviathan; he would have told izuku off for beating himself up for having a "villanous quirk", said some flowery stuff about self-perception, and told him that he was nothing like the leviathan. ouch.
while the story would have been gen, izuku and shinsou would have gotten a lot closer. i was (and honestly? still am!) a big shindeku fan and think they have a fun dynamic, in canon and aus. this would have been interesting, because it would have led to a lot of miscommunication irt izuku trying to hold shinsou at arm's length because of his leviathan guilt, and shinsou not understanding why. maybe they could have had a big fight about it right before izuku gets kidnapped during the training camp arc.
izuku would have gotten closer with iida and uraraka as well, explored some of their issues/ todoroki.... maybe? i'm not sure. i have terminal "gets annoyed by the most popular ship in a fandom" disease, so i was never a huge tododeku guy. but they probably could have had something interesting.
i think izuku and naomasa were also supposed to talk a little more? since naomasa was one of the people present at OG leviathan incident, their relationship was meaningful. also i just really like naomasa, as people may remember.
i legit have no idea what would have happened with bakugou. i didn't really... care about him, then? and i don't really now (though i'm much more ambivalent than i used to be lol). he might have gotten some occasional beats of self-reflection, but i wasn't ever really that interested in giving him a Big Coming Around Arc. i do in retrospect think I could have; putting him in 1-B set up an interesting situation for him to be with the """"lesser"""" crowd and learn to see them as people, and himself as one, too.
mirio gets all for one, most likely. or kirishima, or something. maybe he offers it to izuku, but izuku is like HELL NOOOO. sorry. no thank you.
and... that's that. it's weird to write all this out. this is actually the first time i've ever seen it all laid out. there's probably some stuff i'm forgetting, and maybe i'll come back and update later, but this is fine for now.
this story... was never meant to be about anything, really. i just started writing it because i wanted to write a bnha fanfic, and i liked quirk!izuku aus. all impulse, all just vibes. i still think it's not necessarily a Big Meaningful Message. but i was talking to people the other night about stuff, and realized something, kind of. when i was writing all of this, I had no idea. but in the time since, i've been diagnosed with a mild-ish form of psychosis and OCD.
so... make of that what you will.
thank you everyone, as ever, for reading, and i hope this brings you... closure? that sounds so much more important than it is, ha! the answer to a mystery, maybe. and maybe some day i'll find the motivation to actually write it as it would have been.
tbh one of these days may make a post summarizing what i remember of what would have happened in leviathan. wouldn’t even be a real summary bc genuinely not much was planned that i can remember 7 years after the fact but i do know what the big mysteries were
(very tiny sketchbook, could fit in a hoodie pocket)
Side note I notice you put our names as tags and clicked on mine since I got curious and. Wow. Ive... sure been here a while. Ironically I think you helped inspire me to write fanfic so thanks?
HE’S CUTE….. he looks like one of those crinkly stuffed animal dog toys
and i’m glad! i’ve been told leviathan inspired a lot of people to do a lot of things and it genuinely is one of the things im most proud of. if ive led to more art in the world, thats all i need.
I think I have an old sketch I did where I tried to draw the Leviathan from memory during school somewhere in my room. Newsflash it's awful but I like. Gotta find it now.
Yoooo it feels like forever sine I've seen/heard of you and leviathan on my dashboard! I really like your comics! BTW my main Google profile is still a piece of leviathan fanart lololol. Good times.
pal suggested it, so in the spirit of redraws, here’s a very quick sketchy redraw of this comic(?) from almost 7 years ago. whooph
i’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with actual comic layouts because of my webcomic (COUGHS LOUDLY), so this was an exercise in translating the original squares to that, but also testing my speed and, well, art improvement. i like to look back on how far i’ve come.
also, a fun fact: the ask that prompted this comic was how i met one of my closest and dearest friends of now over 6 years, TJ! let this be a lesson to never be afraid to send an ask to that creator you like, haha
Wow I just recently got into that and it looks great! I'm loving it so far and I'm eager to see what's about to happen with this robot talking to the guy he now seems bound to.
I am! It’s been my baby for a little over two years now (though the comic itself has been running for only a few months and I had carpal tunnel for about a third of that lol). I’m honestly tremendously proud of it so far and very excited for what’s to come. Leviathan taught me some valuable lessons about planning that I’ve been putting into practice, so a lot of the major beats are already mapped out (though a substantial amount of “winging it” still keeps coming through. It seems to just be my style.) so I feel good about keeping with it.
And thank you! So glad to hear you’re enjoying it. We’re just getting into the fun of it :)
As a scuba diver, the underwater scenes in Leviathan were quite nice, both accurate and emotional. I don't have much time at the minute, but when I get back into writing MHA fics I plan to attempt to do Leviathan justice in a spin-off. Again, thank you for writing it.
yeah, a lot of the scenes were inspired by my few scuba experiences! it's something that continues to resonate with me to this day, and i was trying really hard then to recapture the emotions and do it justice. i miss diving dearly, but it's hard to find the opportunity.
best of luck with your writing, and i'd love to see if you do bring my guys around!
Hey! I know you’re never going to finish Leviathan, but I want to thank you for writing it! It’s genuinely one of the most comforting series I’ve read since I struggle with a lot of anxiety, and even if you were just 14 you did a beautiful job at writing these underwater scenes that were just so calming. I really appreciate all the work and effort you put into this and I hope that you’ll continue to put that love into everything you do :)
thank you anon!! i really appreciate this, i'm glad it helped you :)
