Actually despondent that now in addition to desiring Yokohama fic, I desperately crave The Adventures of Midoriya Izuku, Normal U.A. Student. Why is this kid so ruthlessly competent and crazy??
The funniest thing is that I'm not sure he's ever once realizes how feral he comes off to literally everyone around him. Like he probably thinks of himself as a dweeby nerd who's done an awesome job of pretending to be a rising young hero. Meanwhile, everyone around him is just going, ah yes, there's my good friend izuku. If you need alcohol, drugs, or someone locked in an underground bunker dead, he would absolutely be my first choice Could you talk a little about that, if you like?
Also if you want you share any other stories of izuku's attempts to gain practical experience, pleaseeee feel free. They are so funny. (I feel so bad for aizawa, who is at any time between 2.5 and 0 years away from understanding his insane student.)
So, I think I talked about this a little with my Daredevil fics, but I have different “versions” of characters depending on which fic they’re from. They all have the same core traits, but they’re all slightly distinct from each other because of their disparate experiences.
Pez turned into this surprise sleeper hit for me because this Izuku became one of my favorite Izuku’s based on how fucking feral and competent he is. Aizawa is worried about what he is Doing at literally all moments of the day because it quite literally could be anything. I adore him.
There’s this part in chapter 5 where Izuku is like “I committed to winging it at this school” and that is effectively what he has been doing this entire goddamn time. He has no idea what a normal high school experience is. He has since lost almost all respect for authority and thinks of rules as the things he gets around for necessity and love of the sport. You are 100% right that he thinks of himself as a sort of dweeby nerd and everyone else is like “I am actually terrified of him and how he lives.”
Izuku in pez has been “yes anding” his way through this high school experience. He thinks of what must be done And Then He Does It. He figures out if he can actually do it while he’s doing it. Fuck it, let’s see.
To a degree, the entire Dekusquad is viewed in the same light, because they are almost always on Izuku’s same bullshit. Todoroki is his ride or fucking die, Iida tells himself that he is there to supervise, Uraraka needs an outlet for her own violent tendencies, and Yaoyorozu is doing this for the love of the sport. And they also have no idea how unhinged they are. Their echo chamber is populated exclusively by them, all insane.
Fundamentally, Midoriya Izuku is someone who dug up land mines to turn himself into a makeshift rocket without advance planning or hesitation for what was, at the end of the day, a school obstacle course. He lives and dies by the immortal words “fuck it, we ball.” He is completely unaware that other people do not live this way and everyone else is too afraid to tell him.
All jokes aside, Izuku’s feral hyper competence in pez is partially the result of 1) Mirio and 2) Stain.
When Izuku first started helping Mirio train, he locked the fuck in harder than he ever has in his entire fucking life. Quirks are a huge boon to heroics, but it’s also a bit of a crutch. Heroes rely on them. Quirkless heroes wouldn’t have that option.
Mirio and Izuku developed their physical abilities and practical skills to a degree that very, very few heroes ever even attempt. Izuku always knew that a Quirkless hero couldn’t afford to be mid tier. Mirio would have to be better than every other person in the room to even have a chance. Izuku learned right alongside him.
But that just explains the hyper competence. The feral rule breaking is because of the aftermath of Stain.
Aizawa is as hard and as strict with his kids as he is because he does not want them thinking the rules do not apply to them. That’s how you end up with heroes who abuse their power. But Izuku and Todoroki specifically came into UA with an engrained belief that the rules only applied to them.
It is, again, Aizawa misunderstanding the issue with them. He doesn’t want them going off on their vigilante bullshit because they are going to be responsible for upholding the law and need them to respect it and understand it applies equally to them. But the law has never applied equally to Izuku and Todoroki. The rules have always existed to hurt them.
Izuku and Todoroki both grew up in abusive situations. When Izuku’s classmates hurt him, spewed hate at him, destroyed his things? It was fine. Izuku’s too sensitive. He’s just trying to get people in trouble over nothing. But if he so much as raised his voice? People would come down on him like a sack of bricks. Rules exist for a reason, after all. Izuku should understand that he doesn’t get exceptions.
Todoroki grew up getting beaten by the number two hero. He watched as doctors and police and his father’s employees turned a blind eye to the number two hero. But he couldn’t break his dad’s schedule without getting punished. If he started to suffocate under it all and ran off just so he could have even a second to breathe? He got picked up and dragged back and lectured by whatever hero or cop who caught him about how he should know better than to worry people and how it’s selfish to have caused this much of a fuss and he needs to be better.
And he’d sit there boiling in his own anger knowing that this devotion to the fucking rules would dry up the second it drifted towards applying to his father.
Stain sort of affirmed for Izuku and Todoroki that nothing had really changed. They broke the rules due to absolute fatal necessity. If they hadn’t done what they did, Iida and Native would be dead. They fought for their fucking lives and for the lives of the people with them.
And when they got back, they got lectured for it. They had done everything wrong. They should have picked differently. The police would never approve because they made the wrong call.
But, notably, they still got an exception from the rules. They escaped punishment. But not because they had done the right thing, no. They should have let stain kill Iida and Native both. But they’re such promising young heroes, so let’s not let this misstep trip them up.
They didn’t want to escape punishment because they were suddenly of the same category of exceptional, worthwhile person who had always kept their boot on their fucking necks. They wanted them to recognize that they made the right decision.
And then they got back to UA, and Aizawa called them out in front of everyone for making a bad call. And they were like “oh, okay. So nothing’s changed.”
The rules are arbitrary and capricious. They exist to hurt them. When people are granted exceptions, it’s not because there’s a good reason. It’s because they’re the Right Kind of Person. As a result? Izuku and Todoroki’s respect for the rules is nonexistent, and they’ve infected the rest of the Dekusquad with this attitude to an extent.
The Dekusquad doesn’t actually break rules for the sake of breaking rules. They just don’t respect the rules because the rules have been consistently applied contrary to their own ethics. They don’t break the rules that matter. But if there’s not a compelling reason to follow a rule? Fuck it, who cares. The rules don’t matter anyway. They’ve never mattered when they were the ones getting hurt.
A list of the bullshit Midoriya Izuku had done in his time at UA in the name of practical experience that has given Aizawa anxiety or would if he knew about it, abridged:
While in his first year, he and Mirio did a week-long bomb-defusing symposium during a school break for an experiential learning credit. UA students need some kind of emergency response practical credit and most people do a triage course and cross it off the list. But the national police academy also accepted hero students in their yearly course and Mirio and Izuku were like “oh fuck yeah” and signed up.
All Might signed off on this because he thought this was a wholesome activity for young people everywhere and no one told Aizawa. All Might is the spiritual team dad of the Dekusquad because he is the one most likely to say “that sounds like a wholesome activity for young people everywhere” and sign off on it
Bombs are just less of a thing nowadays. They’re obsolete. It’s like how black powder cannons aren’t so much as used because there’s better alternatives. Random people were getting born that could cause an explosion a just by sneezing. And they were cheaper and easier to hire than building a bomb, harder to track, and less likely to be discovered by a metal detector or police investigation. Bombs are still enough of a thing that very major cities maintain dedicated bomb squads but smaller cities do not. Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong, London, they have bomb squads. Anything smaller and they don’t have the funding for it, and bombs are rare enough that this hasn’t been a problem.
As a result, Izuku and Mirio are two of three people in a sixty-mile radius who maintain a bomb defusing license. The third is a seventy-three year old ex cop with a hand tremor.
They all find this out because some wannabe bank robber ends up deciding to go the bomb route because the cops wouldn’t expect it and then has to call them crying because he also doesn’t know how to turn that thing off.
Aizawa finds out that Yagi that fucker gave Izuku another reason to run towards explosions when like nine police cars pull up on the UA lawn and desperately ask for Midoriya Izuku, licensed bomb technician, because Mirio is fuck knows where doing underground spy shit and the seventy-three year old already had his half cup of coffee for the day and could not survive a game of operation, let alone a bomb
Izuku has to defuse this fucking thing with three judgmental ghosts trying to backseat drive this bomb refusal, Aizawa trying to calm himself down at the police line, and the entire Dekusquad having to be repeatedly told that they can’t just wait in the room with the bomb for Izuku to finish because they have an appointment at the mall to take a formal family portrait and Iida hates to be late
To a certain degree, the entire Dekusquad is Like This. None of them have any goddamn clue how to behave like actual children and their efforts towards experiencing normal childhood frivolity culminated in the Pizza Underground. They carved a convoluted path out of one of the most secure campuses on the planet because they had no idea how the fuck to be kids and that seemed like a normal way to start
That being said they actually had some of their best fucking times when they were sneaking out on the Pizza Underground. They didn’t use it for vigilantism—Aizawa was likely to find out about vigilantism, and they never wanted to compromise the route. They actually used it to just goof off and have fun.
The Pizza Underground is another reason in a long list of reasons why the rest of Class A is vaguely distressed by how hardcore Dekusquad is. The rest of the school is vaguely distressed by how hardcore Class A is, and the Dekusquad are the concerningly locked in ones amongst them. All of Class A knows they have a way in and out but they don’t know what it is
All Might is like 17% responsible for Dekusquad’s insanity because he takes a larger hand in Izuku’s life than the other’s students’ lives and is trying to be a good team dad for his pseudo son and his friends. But the thing is All Might is also completely insane and his agency hates him for good reason. He spent multiple decades evading his own safety nets so he could have secret mind game conflict bullshit with his nemesis without having to tell his own agency. All Might keeps taking Mirio + the Dekusquad out for “fun team building activities” which involves lessons on losing tails and variations of hunting each other for sport through Tokyo with paintball guns. He takes them for ice cream at the end and ruffles their hair
When Mirio was training for his licensing exam, he and Izuku convinced Nedzu to buy circus equipment for the school because 1) Izuku read old Batman comics and knew about Dick Grayson, and 2) they watched old pre-Quirk cirque de soleil videos and were like “that’s it that’s the vision.” Their fighting style is this ungodly mix of Krav Maga, Jujitsu, boxing, Muay Thai, aikido, and circus bullshit as a result
There’s a gif in the last chapter where Todoroki and Izuku tackle Iida to the ground shouting “Get down, Mr. President” which is based on that internet game where you and all your friends put fingers to your ear like you’re the secret service hearing something in your ear piece and the last one who hasn’t done it yet is the “President” who gets tackled by his “secret service agents” who are shouting “Get down, Mr. President.” Todoroki found a post about it online and brought it to the rest of the Dekusquad claiming that it would help them train their situational awareness. Iida said, “that sounds like a worthy goal” and has been tackled 76 times since. Iida is always Mr. President.
The Dekusquad keeps trying to go on vacation together and every single time it devolves into an international incident. The precedent that began with I-Island persisted. Aizawa stopped approving their group overnight leave requests until Momo floated a trip to her family’s private island and Aizawa approved because he figured it’d be safe enough since there were literally no other people on the island. Villains picked that night to try and steal expensive art momo’s family kept on the property and the Dekusquad locked the fuck in and terrorized those poor adult villains.
The Dekusquad is planning a two week post graduation trip through Europe and Aizawa is breathing into a paper bag. Technically they’re not His Problems by then but there is not a doubt in his fucking mind that he is going to be receiving a 3 a.m. from the Swedish authorities who want to know what’s wrong with them. He Doesn’t Know Okay.
