So, UA is the best hero school in Japan. What do you think an average hero school would be like?
So this kind of turned more into me writing about how hero schools in general may be different rather then what may be the average school. Sorry if that isn't exactly what you want. My brain just kept going on tangents and here we are.
So I think that there are three ways the other hero schools would be made distinct. First is what they teach. I always saw schools like UA and Shuketsu as the Havard and Yale of hero schools. They are the best of the school, and they are outliers to it. I see UA as a place where they have the resources and manpower to cover dozens of different fields. Even with such a profitable enterprise as hero work, not every one is going to have world renowned alumni wanting to put money back into it. It may be something as simple as a regular high school that happens to have a hero course as a part of it. There could be schools that specialize in rescue work, in making support equipment, or even heroes as public figures. They can teach other things, but those would be the major focus of their curriculum.
The second is the broader strokes of the schools and how they operate. When it comes to schools in the setting, I prefer to look to real life schools and colleges for comparison. Like when I wrote about my own ideas for Shiketsu and how they operated, I took a lot of inspiration from military schools and their culture. There are plenty of different kinds of schools, both real and fictional, that you could inspiration from. Maybe there is an old hero school that isn't as big as it use to be. Yet it still tries to emphasize the prestige of hero work and are kept alive by rich alumni. Kind of like a lot of blue blood boarding schools. Maybe there is a school that is far less restrictive in how it's teaching the kids. Maybe it focuses more on hero work through practical learning and focus more on personal branding. Kind of like new age schools.
Finally is just the culture of the schools. There are any number of ways you could make a hero school unique just how they live their lives. This could be anything from how the students are treated, to the kinds of rules that they live by, to even the traditions and events of the school. There's any number of ways you could make a school distinct like this. Maybe they have a strong focus on sports and similar games to train the students. Maybe the students are graded on their own points to replicate the hero ranking system. Maybe they are divided into groups to compete against one another. Maybe it's just like a typical high school where you get bullied by people with super powers. What I'm saying is that you can take any one of the gimmicks from your favorite fictional schools and probably find someway to make it fit into the setting.
