I don’t know if I’ve said something along these lines before so apologies if I have or if someone else has, and also apologies if this is completely incoherent. I have a lot of feelings. There are lots of grammar mistakes. It is 2:00 AM.
THIS IS MY THEORY FOR THE ENDING OF BNHA, AND WHY I BELIEVE THAT IT WON’T BE LIKE THE TIME SKIP THE FANDOM HAS IMAGINED UP UNTIL THIS POINT. (this is long and slightly spoilery)
Part one: fandom expectations
So at the beginning of the manga, the general story is protecting the status quo versus disrupting the status quo. The villains are evil for evil’s sake and the heroes are good for good’s sake. People are heroes because they think it’s the right thing to do, they want to save people, they think it’s cool, or they want the status symbol. All the kids want to be heroes! It’s a massively popular job with very few people actually working it, proportionately. People that don’t end up as heroes end up disappointed (or at least, that’s what I imagine. We don’t actually have a lot of examples of failed heroes in the manga, or at least none that jump out at me). Quirks are common, everybody wants a cool quirk, and people without them aren’t necessarily discriminated against but they ARE an ‘other’.
People who have quirks that aren’t powerful and aren’t hero-worthy, or go against one of the other societal values of the BNHA world (which are the same as ours: we value beauty, money, power, and conventionality, generally speaking), ARE discriminated against. Take heteromorphic quirks, for example. They make people uncomfortable because the people with them aren’t conventional, so they are treated as ‘lesser than’. People with quirks that affect their mental state, or people with unconventional mental states who happen to have a quirk that’s easy to vilify, (such as Toga) end up as social outcasts who are more likely to want to disrupt the society that cast them out.
The way that the society in BNHA is so quirk-focused, and the way that it glamourizes hero work, has a lot of negative effects that are shown throughout the series.
If I asked the earlier BNHA fandom to picture what a time skip would look like after the manga’s completion, the general idea, at least to my understanding, would be that the main cast would be heroes at the top, and the villains would be eradicated and the status quo protected. The kids are at hero school, why the hell wouldn’t they be heroes in the end?
Now that we’ve seen the villains’ motivations, and seen the harm that the status quo causes, the manga has shifted in a direction where the heroes are also moving in a similar direction as the villains, but fighting the villains because the villains do it in a way that kills people. A lot of speculation about the way that the series is going to end is shifting.
What if I told you that I think that not only are the kids not going to end up as heroes, but there will be no heroes by the end of BNHA. In fact, I think there will be no more quirks.
Part two: the quirk singularity doomsday theory (QSDT)
For a series that happens in a relatively linear way, there's a lot of talk about the quirk singularity doomsday theory, which predicts an event that, if it were to happen, would happen decades to centuries after the events of the series. I think it's interesting how the warning signs of the QSDT becoming reality are already sort of happening: Eri and the kids at Bakugou and Todoroki's provisonal license make-up classes are there to show that quirks are already starting to mix to become too powerful for children to use them safely. While it's an interesting bit of world-building, this specific aspect of the story hasn't had a clear purpose yet.
Unless it does have a very, very clear purpose;
To show that the status quo of the BNHA world isn't just unsustainable in a social sense, but also in a physical one; that if nothing were to be done about it, the QSDT would in fact come true and doomsday would happen. I think it exists to show that even if villains weren't a problem, something needs to change or else total collapse is inevitable.
Part three: AFO and OFA
In a different (and worse) version of BNHA, the big bad villain would probably have a quirk like a crazy version of Bakugou's or something -- something big and flashy and intimidating but ultimately predictable. I find AFO interesting as a villain not because he's particularly unique as a character, but because he's unpredictable. We've never really seen the full extent of his power and he always keeps us on our toes.
According to an interview or something I saw somewhere (never quote me on anything) the original draft of BNHA had Deku as a quirkless kid for the entire thing, relying on his smarts alone to become a hero; apparently Horikoshi's editors thought this wouldn't sell very well as the protagonist needed to have some kind of flashy and marketable power, so OFA was born, alongside its mechanics and lore.
All Might, Izuku, and OFA are very direct parallels to AFO, Shigaraki, and AFO (the quirk). OFA is not only similar to AFO in the way that they were born from the same place and operate in a similar way, but also that they're both unpredictable. Horikoshi has purposefully left both the audience and the people in the story out of all of the complexities of what OFA and AFO can do as quirks, probably so that he doesn't end up breaking his own rules down the line -- but also for another reason.
Part four: what's happening in the manga??? (SPOILERS)
Right now, as of chapter 369, OFA and AFO are both going batshit insane. AFO and Shigaraki have melded together, AFO's body is regenerating and will eventually disappear, ShigAFO is mutating like crazy even under the effects of erasure, Izuku is using all of OFA and manifesting the vestiges in the physical realm, the rules of time, space, and death are being bent, shit's wild and I love it. It seems like nothing is off the table, and anything is possible at this point.
But where is it all going? What will happen once the battle is over?
My best guess is that once AFO's body disappears and Deku (and hopefully Bakugou dhjdhjd) wins the fight against Shigaraki, Shigaraki's body will like. Peel away or something and Tenko will be left. But that's like, really specific and I genuinely don't know if that's where Horikoshi is going or not.
Part four: where am I going with this?
I don't know the specifics, but either at the climax of the final battle or right after, this is what I think will happen. Either:
AFO and OFA merge, possibly when AFO tries to steal OFA. There's a consistent theme in BNHA about merging with other people, becoming other people, sharing consciousness, mind and body etc. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that if this happens, a cataclysmic event will occur (that could potentially steal every single quirk on the planet, therefore overloading AFO and destroying all of them) (It's been established that even the quirks that AFO has already are rebelling against him, so this could also kill AFO's consciousness, two birds with one stone).
Shigaraki (or Tenko) willingly works to undo the harm he's caused by removing everyone's quirk and destroying them, bringing about equality.
A third thing that combines these.
I think that an ending like this for BNHA would suit it. Not only would it subvert expectations and tie up loose ends, but it would also fit the narrative, at least in my opinion. Deku says at the very beginning that 'not all men are born equal', and throughout BNHA that philosophy has been one of if not the most important driving force in the plot. (It's why, in my opinion, the story fits so well as an allegory for disability, queerness, and the like). It would be almost poetic for everyone to end the story on equal footing. Deku and Bakugou don't have to compete for the spot of number one, because they'd both be the greatest heroes for bringing about a new age of peace.
I dunno.
anyway.
These are all just my thoughts. I'm aware that Horikoshi probably has a different plan for his series and I'm perfectly chill with that. It's just a theory. A game theory
if you have any thoughts I'd love to hear them!