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Man imagine if in MHA, the business course had a student with an OP quirk, and during the sports festival he said "yeah, I dont care for heroics, but winning this shit will look good for my CV when I'm a CEO of a corupt company" - perfect opportunity to explore the dychothomy between super powers and heroism - hell the charachter could then develop and realise that using his powers for less selfish reasons is better
And then just finish it with a double subversion, him not becoming a "super hero", but using his quirk in a unique but really necessary way, like idunno, give them heat control, to use for clean energy to solve both polution and lack of it or something, while using his business skils to manage corporate and goverment redtape and beauracry
Like even if one dislikes my example, its just a placeholder to express that, we really missed out for a social satire as quirks as a metaphor - cause everything had to be reduced to supercops...
This submission has given me ideas about how much better, with hindsight, My Hero Academia could have done more worldbuilding on how Business and Support Courses work, and give far more compelling stories and character progression to Mei Hatsume and Re-Destro.
I’ll get to the Re-Destro stuff below, as I have a lot to say. But I want to address something you wrote first:
And then just finish it with a double subversion, him not becoming a "super hero", but using his quirk in a unique but really necessary way, like idunno, give them heat control, to use for clean energy to solve both polution and lack of it or something, while using his business skils to manage corporate and goverment redtape and beauracry
I really wish we had shown more of the UA students using their skills for something other than superpowers. The final arc even had that opportunity: I know people are pissed Denki and others didn’t get some big flashy superhero fight, but the manga did a good job of showing that Denki, Momo, and others are also valuable for what they can do to alleviate resource problems we have in our real world, as well as the threat that persists that maybe we then are just dependent on the resources instead of letting go of them.
Think about Book 1 of The Legend of Korra: Mako can generate electricity, but that makes him a raw resource of power, hence keeping him in a lower economic class where it’s not just his labor as a raw product to trade for cash but his literal superpower and the way his body creates it is now separated from him and made into a product, like selling your blood and plasma.
There are so many opportunities to give this idealistic image you show of Pro Heroes figuring out that maybe they are more useful to create clean energy, and the dark side that maybe this perpetuates the same problems Pro Hero society has had for so long--but Horikoshi never tried to take this approach.
And yes, it would help navigate gray areas: “Maybe big business does do some good things,” “Maybe corporations can be used for good.”
Stan Lee helped co-create Iron Man in order to take the worst kind of person in that time period--a corporate leader creating weapons that were perpetuating a damn foolish war that never should have been started--to see whether the creative team could make a character that even young anti-war activists would sympathize with, cheer on, and see progress into a better person.
Horikoshi keeps doing this: there are so many cliches and notable moments in comic book history, and he just doesn’t tap into them to say something new. I am so not going to cheer on libertarian bullshit, but you can’t talk about comics if you’re not going to talk about Iron Man, the Question, Spider-Man, and Blue Beetle as objectivist Ayn Rand / Steve Ditko dream projects and how later creators have perpetuated, celebrated, agreed with, ironized, criticized, satirized, or condemned those characters and the politics they hold.
Okay, now onto my rambling. This is going to be another long response, so let’s again put up some headings to outline the answer better.
Let Mei Hatsume flirt with villainy
Your submission has big Mei Hatsume energy--and it’s not as if I haven’t toyed with the idea about whether Mei would become a villain, or an inadvertent one.
Granted, that idea seems a little too close to what they did with Entrapta in the She-Ra reboot--but if it worked there, it’d work here.
I’m kind of surprised the manga never said, “Oh, by the way, after the Pro Heroes failed to stop Shigaraki and ended up letting the PLF get stronger, some of Mei’s inventions got stolen by Villains and that’s why the Cider House Gang was able to get their hands on those Support Items.”
It felt like a missed opportunity to show how Mei’s work could be corrupted, it’d give her something more to do to the story, maybe give her an arc, maybe show other dimensions to her, how Power Loader or someone else gets her confidence back, reassures her it’s not her fault--and it’d pay off that potential villainy that she showed (but which we are definitely not actualizing here because she is a good person) way back in the Sports Festival by using Tenya as her glorified mannequin to show off her inventions, the kind of behavior you describe in your submission.
Make Re-Destro a UA alumnus and donor
Let’s go back to how you started this submission, about how the Business Course could end up giving rise to a potential corporate villain: yeah, it’s another missed opportunity.
I am going to go in another direction, to suggest, what if that potential corporate villain just flat-out did become a corporate villain.
If we are really going to have this many problems with this story, where everything has to be connected when really they should not have been (maybe Shigaraki should not have been Nana’s grandchild; maybe Geten should not be related to the Todorokis), why not just say:
“Screw it, Re-Destro went to UA in the Business Course”?
Horikoshi weirdly avoids taking the path of certain comic book cliches that could have been deconstructed or at least fun references: what is Lex Luthor if not the corrupt businessman who also happened to have gotten his start because he grew up with Clark Kent in Smallville? (Granted, I am mixing together the original origin story, Smallville, and John Byrne’s reboot…Sidebar: Fuck John Byrne, what a bigoted sack of shit.)
I know we have far too many of these characters having been alumni of UA: All Might (how did no one recognize All Might and Toshinori Yagi were the same person if he was in the UA Sports Festival?), Endeavor, Best Jeanist, Edgeshot, Midnight, Oboro, Present Mic, Aizawa.
But we never showed a Business Course graduate. Why not let it be Re-Destro?
It was so boring that All For One was scouting UA like a raccoon digging through his own personal dumpster in order to try to steal Aizawa’s Quirk and settle for Oboro’s corpse. And I hated how All For One just happened to have numerous moles, not just Aoyama but also all those other no-names in the final arc. All For One’s power (his literal superpowers, not just his political power) is so massive that it stretches believability, mostly because he has been set up as a villain so powerful that you can’t think of any way to defeat him--which is why the ending fails to actually give a satisfying way of stopping his physical might. He is a symbol of fascism, and defeating fascism, while requiring a ton of force, also depends on beating a bad idea with a much better idea--and it is difficult to boil down that fight of ideas to just two super-powered individuals punching each other.
All For One is not the person who would be able to infiltrate UA, and he is not a great option for storytelling and symbolism purposes to have him be the one to infiltrate UA.
But Re-Destro would be.
It’d make sense that Re-Destro would use UA to scout for new talent for the MLA. It’d be sadly realistic: corrupt corporate mogul funding schools to get the kind of lackeys and resources he needs for future conquest. It would fit with comic book cliches. It would finally let us do some worldbuilding as to how the Business Course, and likely also the Support Course, works, see more of the teachers, maybe some of them are with the MLA inside of UA, and maybe some of the teachers and students actually hate Re-Destro, whether because they know he’s corrupt, or they have an inkling, or (speaking as someone who has learned and taught in the university system) you just know the corporate funders are aiming those resources towards helping their business and could not care about improving education in languages, ethics, civics, and critical thinking skills.
As you said, “the character could then develop and realize that using his powers for less selfish reasons is better”: what if Re-Destro is that motivation for certain characters to realize that altruism would be better? A student gets brought into Re-Destro's orbit, doesn't know about the MLA yet, but works alongside him and slowly realizes something is wrong. Maybe this character learns about the MLA and helps inform Hawks; maybe this character never learns about the MLA but manages to extricate themselves away just in time, giving the audience a sigh of relief, and they instead get recruited for another business (to show "not all businesses are bad") or a Pro Hero agency (have Centipeder and Bubble Girl recruit them, give them something to do after Nighteye's death).
Or, what if it is a character we already know? What if Ochaco went to work for Re-Destro? What if Re-Destro’s fixation on wealth and advancement made Ochaco temper her desire for money, no matter how good her intentions are? Or, what if Re-Destro's vibe unsettles one of our more wealthy students like Shoto, Tenya, and Momo, and it shows us "not all rich people are bad"? I know this risks saying, “Don’t eat the rich, some of them are good people,” but it would keep asking the question Stain offered, when is there too much fame and wealth being given to glorified super-cops?
And this change to the story would serve Re-Destro better given how little presence he had after his defeat, and how empty he was as an antagonist once he just gives up to Shigaraki, and how little foreshadowing or build-up we had for him.
Re-Destro is to My Hero Academia what Fukuchi is to Bungo Stray Dogs: if this person is such a puppet master, then he should have been present in the background since Chapter 1--show us Detnerat products since Chapter 1, just as Bungo Stray Dogs should have shown movie posters, books, and military recruitment ads with Fukuchi since Chapter 1. Or, if Re-Destro and Fukuchi were such late additions to their stories, the anime adaptation should have fixed that. Granted, they didn’t have the same amount of time between first appearance of the character in the manga and first produced episode of the anime, but think how well this worked in Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood: “Here’s Father, yes we are introducing him early so that the Sins, the Ling stuff, the Alkahestry stuff, and the Xerxes stuff does not come off as such an ass-pull especially for those only familiar with the first anime, not the manga.”
I know this is very “me”: “Oh, you just want the story to be like this because you’re familiar with school politics!” Um, yeah? This manga has “academia” in the title--I’m a lifelong superhero fan, I enjoy poring over comics for how their stories and paneling are structured, but this series started so well because it took such well-worn genres, the superhero story and the school life manga story, and combined them to get something new, then fumbled the project by not getting back to the school stuff and using the superhero stuff to pull apart the school life story cliches and respond to the ongoing problems in education. I want a story that flat-out makes the donor to the big school into a bad guy--I want us to interrogate how much harm is done to education when the quality of the education depends on a handful of donors.
Make Re-Destro the arch enemy of Nezu
And this would also go a long way to give Nezu his own arch enemy. The story waits a long time before revealing, in trivia or in the text, that Nezu is rich and funds UA mostly on his own. Cool--but let’s show that Nezu still needs help from others, and maybe he is that big brain to know to keep his enemies closer, where he’s playing chess against Re-Destro, who is so ignorant that he thinks he’s the one pulling the fast one on, if we allow him to say this line, “some highfalutin lab rat.”
It’d be even funnier with the MLA having its rat symbol that it’s Nezu, so animalistic, being the one to screw over Re-Destro.
Think of how this would improve upon what, say, DuckTales 2017 tried to do and didn’t pull off as well: Scrooge is now a businessman in the 21st century, corporations no longer typically run on the whims of just one owner, there can be shareholders and managers and accountants like Bentley and his brothers getting in the way.
Same idea here: Nezu may be in charge of UA, but even he has to answer to the donors and, ahem, “customers”--if he screws up, he risks losing money. And when UA has villains robbing their paperwork, attacking students at USJ, attacking a student at the mall, and kidnapping and injuring more students, of course Re-Destro now can use this as a power play against Nezu. Come on, what is the point of having Re-Destro’s partner in crime be a politician like Trumpet if we’re going to chicken out and not get political about this story?
2024 happened. That's what changed things. Fuck off.
And give me a few weeks, and I'll post something about one fanbase going through its own equivalent of Chapter 113 / "It was a prequel" problems regarding a disappointing last act that leaves me asking, "First time, huh?"
There's a reason, as often as I could since 2024, I referred to myself as a Biden Democrat: his presidency was excellent, and far better than the mess you motherfuckers did to us by refusing to vote for Harris.
There's also a reason why, since about 2015, I have referred to Republicans as Nazis: they stand for the same bigotry, anti-Jewish hatred, anti-LGBTQ hatred, hatred against disabled people, along with so much other bigotry against women, Black people, and marginalized people that they are the modern-day equivalent of the Nazi Party.
Tonight, one state chose for its Democratic Party senatorial nominee a misogynist with a covered up Nazi tattoo who used his acceptance speech to bash Biden's age.
Fuck Platner. Fuck the people who voted for him, donated to him, and endorsed him.
Forgive my selfish focus on what I can do more than what people in his state should do with their vote, but I don't know where I go from here. I see value in staying registered as a Democrat so that my vote can cancel out the vote of people who would most certainly vote for the same anti-woman anti-Jewish pro-Nazi idiots. But right now, at least tonight, I can call myself a Biden Democrat--but for tonight, I am very much in the mood of saying, fuck the Democratic Party--you're acting no better than the fucking Republicans. Fuck you.
I haven’t said much because I feel like others have been saying it a lot better than me, but absolutely fuck everyone who supports Platner and caused Mills to drop out. The SAME people online who throw out the accusation of supporting genocide at the drop of a hat viciously defend a former voluntary Blackwater mercenary who got an SS tattoo on his chest, kept it for years, and referred to it as his totenkopf. That’s not even mentioning when he made comments blaming women for getting raped and posted shit online about desecrating corpses during war. Oh yeah, AND he voted for his Republican opponent Susan Collins up until 2020!
But no, he became the darling of the podcast bros and dirtbag left all because he has “working class aesthetics” (meaning: big man authentic and old woman inauthentic bitch), spends more time bashing Democrats than Republicans, and because these people evidently believe a misogynistic Nazi is preferable to the “progressive” cause than an old woman. And these people wonder why the left faces misogyny and antisemitism accusations on the regular. I just know that if he wins, he’ll be another Fetterman, and then these people will do what they’ve done with him—lie about having viciously supported him and screamed at his critics, and then claim he’s what’s wrong with the Democratic Party when normie Democrats hated him
The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve.
Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.
If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.
Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.
This is just the beginning. More changes are coming as we keep building this out – stay tuned!
Wait, what the hell? What about creative work? Tumblr isn't just some meme or shitpost factory! OPs won't see notes, comments, or LOVE on their own art, fics, essays, gifsets, photo sets, videos, graphics, announcements, etc. if they're made down the reblog chain? This will only encourage the concerning trend of curation being valued more highly than creation.
The point of our love of reblog chains is that they are a COLLABORATIVE endeavor. The reward is the warm and fuzzy feeling you get having been PART OF SOMETHING SPECIAL, the feeling of participation and belonging, without any promise or expectation of additional reward. Talking about who deserves recognition for what in a thread that is more than the sum of its parts strangles the warm sense of community in favor of isolating individualism.
There's already a reblog graph users can peruse to see how a post has traveled. Boom! Done. "Recognition."
Leave tumblr users to socialize and encourage each other naturally and collaboratively.
DAY 1: SAINT
The first thing I thought to do for this prompt was to redraw an actual saint. I found a statue of Joan d’Arc and thought it made a perfect reference for Maka, with an additional twist with Soul in scythe form x)
DAY 2: TROUBLE
I thought of That One Scene in the anime and knew this was the perfect excuse to redraw it. They always have each others’ backs when one is in trouble!!
