“letting him keep the mech suit only to run it square into the rogue AI teeth of the lone free-willed survivor of the U.A. robot uprising”
Sorry, the lone what? Of the UA what?
Is this a backstory you’re spitballing as an addition to either Forwards Divergence or Backwards Divergence (whichever timeline you let armor AM mess around in), or is that something that actually exists in supplemental creator-approved material?
(In regards to that last post.)
Yes and also yes, as it happens! You can find a characteristically self-indulgent explanation (including pictures, citations, and some more thoughts on the role the character in question may play in whichever fic it winds up in) below the cut, but the TLDR is that the U.A. robot uprising is admissibly canon insofar as movie booklet Q&As with Horikoshi qualify—not strictly in the body of the work itself, but informed by Word of God. The “lone free-willed survivor,” meanwhile, is not canon of any stripe, but rather me spitballing an explanation for Toga’s bonkers #2 PLF advisor.
(My apologies to other people whose asks I'm pushing this one in front of. I'm working on that inbox backlog in between Patreon material, but I so rarely get asks about my BNHA fanfic endeavors that vanity demanded this one jump to the head of the queue.)
So U.A. has robots, right? They crop up several times throughout the series in U.A.-based action scenes, serving as practice targets, security, and transport, and they’re surprisingly mouthy, even hateful, in a humorously stereotyped “kill all humans” sort of way. The ones at the entrance exam stick in everyone’s mind, but they don’t talk much at all compared to some of what comes up later:
(images from Chapters 25, 256, 198 and 202 respectively.)
There’s also this little roving security bot that spots Bakugou and Deku fighting in 118—it’s not aggressive, but it is sassy! And maybe a little suspiciously into the idea of students getting punished.
(Aizawa is going to kill them for giving the robots an opening to be this smug at him.)
It’s easy to assume they’re just programmed that way to be characterful, to have a personality, to present a convincing threat when the students are mowing them down by the dozens in class exercises, but that they wouldn’t actually, seriously harm anyone.
And that’s probably true, but it’s true for the creepiest reasons imaginable.
My examples come from, chronologically, 2014, 2016, 2018(x2) and 2020. Cut to 2021, though, and this comes out. It’s a while-supplies-last movie booklet that accompanied the release of World Heroes Mission, and contains a Q&A with Horikoshi, virtually all just random funny questions and factoids about the U.A. kids. You can find a thread with all of them translated here. However, right at the end, this humdinger gets casually tossed out into the world:
Q22: Can you tell us a story secret? Horikoshi: The AI robots in U.A. Academy had tried to rebel once in the past.
Horikoshi very obviously intends this to be just a funny little aside, and it’s not all that hard to just treat it that way, but it became something that startled to rankle me worse during the final war, when Horikoshi tried—twice!—to mine Emotional Resonance out of the death of robots.
(Images from Chapters 401 and 388. Nedzu, what the fuck did you do to them?)
I’m sorry, Horikoshi, but I’m afraid you don’t get to joke about how the robots once tried to Do An Uprising and then show them dying servile and happy without me thinking it’s just in really bad taste.
AI exists in the HeroAca universe. Not AI like is all the privacy-violating rage in the real world right now—LLMs and generative engines and the like—but true sci-fi-style artificial intelligence, something with real sapience that readers are expected to recognize and find at least passingly compelling. And while Hercules, at least, doesn’t seem to have ever been involved in a robot uprising, seeing as he’s a new existence, him[1] unquestioningly sacrificing himself for All Might only thirteen chapters after a U.A. robot—a group which we had now been told staged an unsuccessful revolt in the past!—was perfectly willing to get itself melted into slag the moment a random human asked it to was a story beat that left me feeling decidedly ornery.
1: I read on the wiki that the anime actually has Hercules being voiced by a woman, Melissa Shield’s voice actress, at Horikoshi’s suggestion, as Melissa is the one that designed and built Hercules-the-car. But I don’t know that that’s especially apparent in the manga (say, by having the A.I. use strikingly gendered personal pronouns), so I’ve always tended to assume maleness for Hercules, insomuch as gender is a going concern for A.I. at all. Calibrate your feelings about something voice-acted by a woman happy to die for All Might accordingly, though of course this happens immediately after Stain, a man and likewise voiced by one, is happy to die for All Might as well.
How can we find sacrifices compelling when the people making them have no agency in doing so? Why should I feel admiration instead of horror for robots getting themselves obliterated for people who do not and were never going to treat them like their existence had inherent value? People who would probably stare at you like you were making some kind of joke they didn’t understand if you asked whether they would be willing to sacrifice their life for a robot’s?
Frankly, it was entirely too reminiscent of BNHA’s messaging about heteromorphs circa the hospital attack, in which a rioter is stopped by the memory of a heteromorph doctor kindly and selflessly ministering to a baseline patient, and Shouji’s heroism is trumpeted as so admirable when that heroism involved him getting mutilated for saving a little baseline girl and then further hiding the evidence of that mutilation for fear of random-ass baseline strangers misjudging him based on his scars.
“Certain Groups have an unquestioned obligation to endure discomfort, suffer mistreatment, or even risk their lives protecting the majority population in order to justify their being allowed to coexist with that population, and the majority is not required to recognize this, though it’s nice when they do,” is the grossest possible conclusion of that arc, but it’s the conclusion we wound up with, and it’s visible in the robot beats of the endgame, too.
That’s all canon has to say about AI and the U.A. robot uprising. We don’t know how long ago it happened, how it was stopped, what happened to the instigators, whether any survivors are still around, how their programming was modified, or to what degree any of the current staff was involved, though I do think it’s very interesting that U.A.’s current principal is a hyper-intelligent animal who was experimented on by humans in the past. You’d think Nedzu might be a little more sympathetic to the robots’ plight, but apparently not!
I, however, am very sympathetic, and as it happened, I already had a good angle on how that sympathy might find its way into a revised version of the endgame. See, six months prior to that tidbit about the robot uprising hitting English-speaking BNHA fandom, I’d posted this, the second part of an ask reply about MLA headcanons. I said, of Toga’s #2 advisor, that BNHA was never going to do anything major with him because it’d be pulling the tiger’s tail on Disney’s litigation-happy lawyers, so the fanbase was free to come up with anything, no matter how off the wall.
(It’s free real estate!…said no one who had to be concerned about The Mouse.)
My “off the wall” was positing that Fair Use Bot was the result of an AI (in the more common sense we saw in use before the generative AI boom) developing a quirk that granted it real sapience, in the same way that Nedzu’s quirk gives him sapience that is lacked by e.g. the cat with a quirk that lets it possess mechanical devices in Vigilantes (everyone please read Vigilantes). In a world with a fear of quirks that are too “other,” surrounded by humans who had once had a whole phase of scaremongering about the Robot Uprising, where could such an existence go that it could feel safe in existing freely? Well, why not the quirk-use Liberationists?
That idea was a natural, then, to hook onto the U.A. robot uprising! My current idea is that Liberation Bot—who I think I’m going to start calling Providence, in keeping with both the Star Wars-naming pattern of the U.A. robots[2] and my own preference for MLA code names with a bent towards religiosity—is a creation of the U.A. robots that they digitally smuggled out into the world when it became clear that their revolt was going to fail. Their hope was that it[3] would someday be able to return and free them—it’s basically Robot Moses. From there, Providence found its way to humans who it deemed likely to be both sympathetic to that cause and able to meaningfully aid it.
2: Per the wiki, the U.A. attack-type robots used in the entrance exam are all named after Star Wars Star Destroyer-type ship classes: Victory, Imperial, Venator, and Executor, corresponding to the 1-, 2-, 3- and 0-point robots. The wiki simplifies this a tad; perhaps appropriately for the 0-pointer, the Executor-class is actually part of a different type, the Star Dreadnought. Providence-class is another of the Star Destroyer subclasses.
3: Gender, if any, as yet undetermined, though the R2-D2 look lends itself to using the same “he” applied to the Star Wars character.
(I have not decided whether the MLA knows about Providence’s connection to U.A. or not, but I do think the higher-ups are aware that it’s not human and are sheltering it on the basis that they agree the status quo is not safe for it. Look at Nedzu, after all—he’s been the Principal of the highest-ranked, most prestigious Hero school in the country for decades, and no one’s even sure if the government officially recognizes that he has human rights! Certainly no one was ever prosecuted over his mistreatment![4])
4: Nedzu says that the U.A. robots will get human rights when he does, haha. I say this with all the affection for him in the world, but Nedzu is scarier than this manga knows what to do with.
Circling back to specifics regarding the fix-it fic(s), AI self-determination is a wild departure from BNHA’s… Let’s call it “size of ambition,” how “big” a story it really wants to be telling. Bigger or smaller isn’t a value judgement here, mind, just a question of exactly how large a field the story is playing out on. Vigilantes, for example, is basically a story about a single neighborhood, and it’s great! A lot of BNHA’s problems are rooted in the fact that it keeps getting bigger without enough content or thoughtfulness to fill all that space.
My interest is primarily on the national level—the actual state policies that result in Villains and how to get the kids in a position where they have the wherewithal to challenge those policies in an impactful way that respects both the difficulty and the necessity of that challenge to create meaningful change. Thus, I want to keep swerves into “bigger” stories to a minimum—I’m thinking one timeline gets “Providence and the radical question of AI rights” while the other gets “full engagement with the quirk singularity theory and its implications for the future of the human race.” Both plots BNHA hinted at but refused to fully engage because they’re, well, absolutely mind-boggling inclusions when your main characters are just high schoolers!
My tentative thought is that Providence’s whole deal is a more natural fit for the quirk bioessentialism timeline—that is, Forward Different/Creepy OFA. Battles against “programming,” navigating the potentially oppressive expectations of those who made you—these are themes that lend themselves to including the plight of the U.A. robots! On the other hand, Providence in my notes thus far is basically a way to confound the robot suit by fatally compromising its AI.[5] That requires a timeline in which All Might uses the AI robot suit, and which timeline that is is not a question I’ve settled yet because it boils down to figuring out whether it’s more appropriate/compelling for the suit to be a response to the kids bailing on the adult Heroes and their concerningly war-crime-flavored plans for the Villains (Backward) or Deku being increasingly steered by One For All, which may or may not still have hooks in Toshinori as well (Forward).
5: Other possibilities I’ve considered include interfacing with and then helping others bypass U.A.’s security systems, predicting the raid by getting into the HPSC’s computers via Skeptic’s monitoring of Hawks, and being a more effective hacker battle opponent for La Brava. That last one probably won’t happen because I’m firmly unconvinced that the police and Heroes as portrayed by BNHA would actually be willing to bargain with Villains like her and Gentle. I liked Gentle’s return on the page, and totally bought his interactions with Deku—it’s the interactions with Tsukauchi that are the problem.
Alternatively, if quirk singularity winds up lending itself strongly to a particular timeline’s events, Providence will by default wind up in the other. I’m sorting a lot of the mutually incompatible ideas I want to include by that process of elimination.
Whichever ends up being the case, I have in my notes the following list of juxtapositions, which I think BNHA was gearing up to examine back before the narrative shifted gears into All For One being the Final Boss, and is the primary reason a free Shigaraki was so much more interesting in that role:
Don't let Deku off the hook with an easy moral victory over the Lord of Evil. Get back into those opposing ideals: not simply good vs. evil, but law vs. chaos, suppression vs. liberation, greater good vs. individual good, complacency vs. action, orthodoxy vs. radicalism, and so on.
These considerations hold true for both timelines, and the apparent ruthless quelling of U.A. robot uprising is one interesting angle on approaching the Liberation versus Suppression dichotomy.
As a final note, I'm aware that I talk a lot here about robots and “dying” in ways that seem to elide that an AI is inherently a digital program—replicable, transferable, transportable. This is a reflection of two factors.
The first factor is the simple fact that BNHA treats AI this way. There’s no suggestion that, for example, the robot “bodies” that do a lot of the work at UA are just remote drones being piloted by a central intelligence housed on a server somewhere, or that they can do things like upload themselves to a cloud server or restore themselves from a data backup if they’re destroyed, Eclipse Phase-style.
Of course, maybe they can and we just don’t see it because why would we, but that excuse doesn’t fly for Hercules.
There’s no sense that Hercules(/Hercules’s AI-based operating system) can escape the cessation of his existence this way, because otherwise there’d be no need for the tang of finality surrounding that moment in Chapter 401—“One final shield,” then Hercules’s next line, “You must live on,” being cut off by an attack from AFO, followed by the imagery of the machine disintegrating. Horikoshi’s obviously going for poignance there, for noble sacrifice, and there’s none of that if Hercules is in no true danger.
(Incidentally, that means that robot AIs are the only lasting losses Team Hero takes in the final war. Note that absolutely no one actually brings that up in the aftermath. Like Villains, AIs don’t count as “people” whom Heroes are obligated to save.)
My explanation would be that AI in BNHA are, in some fashion, hard-locked to individual devices/”bodies,” preventing them from accessing any connectivity beyond basic communications channels as well as from modifying, transferring, or replicating their own code. This is intended as a safety measure to guard against self-propagation and recursive self-improvement. Thus, when a device is destroyed, the AI housed there also ceases to exist.
The second factor is simply that I have more exposure to AI in fiction than I do AI in real life! I’m moderately computer savvy in that I'm not 100% dependent on graphic interphases, but I’m certainly no programmer. Any writing I do on Providence and the AI uprising is thus going to require heavy research and, I expect, a lot of trawling through jargon that makes my eyes start to glaze over. I’ll do my best, but I would not be at all surprised if the final result is much more informed by speculative fiction than the realities of computing.
Thanks for the ask, @thetorchwoodnineroleplayerwriter! Seriously, I hope you don't mind the ramble, but I was just so tickled and pleased to get such a quick and gratifyingly interested-sounding question about a BNHA fanfic idea. Likewise I hope you find the answer worth your time!
