#are you going to be alive to stop it?

[symphonyofsilence]

Let the poor man rest.

[serenadeofthestars]

fuck it, making its own post for this

so reblogged a recent post regarding the trolley problem. well written, nothing wrong to say about it. but then I made the mistake of going into the replies

now, I'm not going to screenshot or say who this person was. but one person claimed that, in the case of the election, it's choosing to let the trolley run over yourself or five other people

no.

using that same metaphor, it's choosing to let yourself get run over *with* the five other people or not. but, if you don't let yourself get run over, you can take action to perhaps help them. you may not succeed. you may get run over by a completely different trolley (police, other institutional things getting in the way). but you certainly won't if you're run over along with them

cause one of the options is certainly gonna run over everyone if he gets the chance.

[undead-cypress]

If they ever make an OVA I want an Ember Island Players recap like on Avatar Last Airbender

Junah's actress keeps breaking out into musical numbers

Neuras's actor captures his energy so perfectly Neuras start making out with him backstage

Basilio's too busy playing with the literal cat that plays him to clock how offensive that is

Louis is being played by the tallest, cuntiest drag queen in the country, which means he's being played by Milo. Everyone agrees this is spot on casting.

Bonus:

ASMR Eupha and Will help you sleep by beating you till you're unconscious

Whoever thought to make the mages weak to strike is a comedic genius

[asvidema]

the affection radiating from hans is palpable here isn't it

[worstloki]

I actually think it would be so funny if Thor adapted to Midgardian clothing and such, wearing t-shirts and jeans and after Asgardians start settling on Earth that's generally what has to happen. But Loki keeps wearing his complicated leathery Asgardian clothing for the apparent sole purpose of jump-scaring any visitors to New Asgard

[stimtfil]

[superbat-lmao]

A Jayroy fic where Jade drops off baby Lian and they just.. retire.

There’s a really difficult conversation they have about dating and raising a kid and vigilante work and they decide screw it. It’s not safe to raise a kid around.

And by retire, I mean they disappear. Go to ground.

(Talia knows what it is to want the best for your child even if they have different opinions on what best is. She gets them off the grid and funded in some sort of suburban hellscape that takes the both of them a while to adjust to. They say they have a deep space mission and just, don’t come back.)

Roy works in a rehab clinic and Jason gets a degree in Literature. He becomes a professor at a small college, taking on graduate students and falling into academia.

They go to therapy, the make friends with other parents, they become normal people. And they have an insane security system for their house, and AI that scrapes cameras of their faces, and a modified basement that Roy compares to the Batcave exactly once that has a gym and space to work on equipment and a method of escape should it be necessary to uproot their lives again.

Because they want to be civilians, but that doesn’t mean that if their past lives come knocking, they’ll be caught unaware and too out of the game to defend themselves. In fact, because they don’t go on patrol, they’re at peak performance at all times and rarely injured more than a sprained wrist or paper cut. Gone are the days of concussions, GSWs, and stab wounds.

The superhero community doesn’t know what to do, what to think. Because all of their resources are expended elsewhere. And because space is a big place, and trying to find two humans in its vastness is an exercise in futility.

So Lian grows up normally. She’s a girl whose parents love her. And her problems are ordinary, like homework and sleepovers and playing soccer.

And when she’s in middle school, the same age as Roy and Jason were when they started superhero training, they tell her about their past lives. About the danger it will bring if they’re found. Because they promised never to lie to her, and to never let her get wrapped up in the vigilante scene.

They’re well adjusted people raising a normal daughter.

And they explain to Lian that they came from very large and complicated families. Families that did dangerous work, work that put anyone who knew about it at risk. And that Lian was a baby, and that all of that risk of their jobs, was not worth her life. That they loved her more than their families, their jobs, their previous lives. But that it meant they could be discovered, and that those old lives would be dragged back up again and she could get hurt.

Lian thinks of it like witness protection.

So Lian memorizes code names and pictures of people that may try and approach her. She learns the differences between friendlies and uglies. Between ex-family, and rogues. And she doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t look into things when her parents ask her not to. Because she trusts them to protect her. She trusts them like a well adjusted young girl who could very well ask her parents for more information, but doesn’t care about the answers because she trusts they’re not important. That it doesn’t change how much they love her or what their lives are.

There are a couple of versions of this:

1. Jason, Roy and Lian live out their lives happily and away from their families. They are never again vigilantes or found out by them.

A) Alfred dies and that is the only thing that almost breaks Jason, that he didn’t get to see the man again before he died.

2. The Bats track them down, ask them what they hell they were thinking, that they thought they were dead. To come home, be part of the family again. They’re told no - and the three of them disappear again to somewhere they’ll never be found.

3. Alfred finds them, says nothing to anyone and once a year, on Lian’s birthday, goes to visit. None of the Bats ever figure it out.

4. Alfred knows where they’re going from the beginning, he keeps them updated on their families and helps hide them from everyone. He never once tells a soul that Jason and Roy are alive. He is allowed to visit Lian sometimes and they are all happier for it.

A) When Alfred gets old enough, he tells Bruce he will be retiring. He asks that he is not followed, that no one from the super hero community is allowed to keep tabs on him. He tells him he’s sorry, but that it has to be this way. Alfred goes and lives the end of his life with Jason, they speak about literature every day, about Alfred’s parents about anything he wants to. Jason buries Alfred in England and Bruce Wayne gets an unmarked alert to its location.

5. The Bats find them, and never approach them. Each Bat basically figures out that Jason is alive, doesn’t say anything to the rest of the family, and keeps tabs on him and Roy. Once they realize that Lian exists, none of them ever breach that level of trust, even as they all grow into old age and move on with their lives.

6. Bruce finds them.

A) He waits for Jason in a cafe, watches him realize who he is and turn to look at the Roy Harper, who nods once and walks away. Jason approaches him and sits down. He asks how he found them. Bruce doesn’t say anything, just looks at his son, alive, seemingly happy. Tells him it was an accident, he had genuinely still thought they were in space, maybe dead, until someone plagiarized Jason’s work, submitted it through a Wayne Enterprises competition of some sort, and it flagged the system. It had been entirely work related, pure coincidence. No capes.

B) And Jason laughs and it’s lighter than Bruce has heard it in years. Jason asks how much Bruce knows about him now, how much intel he gathered before approaching him. Bruce says he knows about their marriage, their daughter, their jobs and habits. Jason nods and he’s smiling. Bruce doesn’t know what to do. He had checked the area, and there were no reports of anything approaching vigilantism, no anonymous casework, no decrease in crime, nothing to suggest the presence of the Red Hood and Arsenal. He hasn’t spoken to Jason outside of business in years, isn’t sure he knows how to anymore. And he looks happy, he’s alive, he’s a civilian.

C) He wants to ask him everything, ask him to come home, wants to know the man his son became. He asks Jason why. Why they disappeared. And Jason is still smiling and it’s honest and Bruce can’t stand to look at him and can’t help it either. So Jason tells him that they will never let their daughter into vigilantism. That they quit, and needed it to be absolute. That he and Roy couldn’t do this halfway, that if they loved their daughter they had to do only what was best for her, and that meant burning their old lives entirely, becoming civilians.

D) Their lives had been too complicated, too many people, too much history. So many ways for things to go badly, to leave Lian without parents or get her killed as leverage against them. And for as much as he and Roy had cared about the people in their lives, couldn’t stop caring about them, they knew that they would just drag Lian into all of the emotional problems that come with being a vigilante. That it wasn’t healthy, for any of them. That trying to do so would kill them. So they disappeared. And Bruce thinks of the pain he and his family had gone through over Jason, wondering how he was doing, if he was dead, hearing nothing and trying not to let it eat at them. But right now, his son is in front of him smiling, something he can’t seem to stop doing. Something Bruce never thought he’d see again.

E) And he has a son in law, a granddaughter. His son has a family, one he built himself. He looks healthy, he’s not closed off, he’s more open than Bruce thinks he’s ever seen him. It’s jarring, like Bruce is wrong footed. He doesn’t know what to say. Wants to tell him about everything that’s happened, to his brothers to their family, to Gotham and old contacts. Wants him back in the loop. Wants to ask about their lives, and college, and his wedding and his daughter. Bruce wants to know all of it. And he wants to know how he did it, how he hid himself so well in plain view.

F) And the detective in him will always prioritize the how over everything else. He wouldn’t be Bruce if he didn’t. So Bruce asks how. And Jason laughs, says he’s not going to tell him.

G) You know I can’t tell you that, old man.

H) He can’t let it go, Bruce can never let anything go, that’s his burden to bear. He tries to push old buttons, doesn’t notice he’s doing it. But Jason won’t stop smiling, won’t switch from civilian to vigilante. There is no trace of anger, of the Red Hood. He doesn’t look surprised and Bruce’s arguments, about flaws in his code, software, he’s just smiling. Won’t rise to the bait. And for once, Bruce has a feeling he’s only felt around Clark. A feeling of being outmatched. Jason knows all of his buttons, isn’t pushing a damn one. Isn’t letting Bruce push his either. It’s not even a stalemate. Bruce has no openings.

I) He starts telling him about his brothers, about missions and life developments. He tries to tell Jason everything. And Jason listens, hears everything he has to say. And Bruce asks him about himself, his life, his husband, his daughter. And he hears about NA and AA meetings, about therapy and raising an infant, and being a professor and his students about their friends and neighbors, about Lian’s friends at school. All of it. Except the how. And at some point, it’s been a couple of hours, but not very long at all, Jason gets a text. He doesn’t look at his phone. And Bruce knows that whatever spell had been cast over the cafe, whatever bubble of another universe he had crossed into, he was about to watch it close. Implode on itself with only him inside. Because Jason was about to leave. All of it, the cafe, the conversation, the smiling and the laughter, it was the one distraction that Bruce was liable to. And Jason has him right where he wanted him. It was something that wouldn’t work twice, and they both knew it.

J) And Jason says, I can’t stop you from telling anyone. I can’t stop any of you from looking for us, but this was the third life of mine that you ended. Of the two of us, I would go to greater lengths to protect my daughter. I am asking you not to make me do something you’ll regret. I am asking you not to look for us, not to tell anyone, not to put it in a report. I did not want to hurt you, any of you. And you have made that unavoidable. I know you, Bruce, and I have spent time healing from everything I’ve been through. I cannot allow you to pull me back into it, to pull the three of us back into your world. I know that this conversation won’t stop you, now that you know. So I’m sorry, I didn’t want to have to say this. I know who you are, who all of you are. It was never a question before, that I would keep your secrets. If you look for us, I will go public. It’s not just your life I’ll be placing at risk, it will be the entire league. I will burn every bridge, every alias. I have redundancies in place, you send a super my way you better be sure to send them all. You better be sure you’ve caught all my backups, all of Roy’s backups, everything. We have avoided you for years without triggering any of your, or the league’s, systems. I can’t predict another accident, but if you know what is best for you and everything you’ve built, you will prevent even that from happening. Do not force my hand.

K) Bruce stands, trying to memorize his son’s face. And then Jason is gone. Disappearing down a street and out of sight. And Roy is waiting for him, their house had been cleared of all traces, Talia has new lives set up for them and Lian is asleep in the backseat.

L) Their lives are busy for the next few weeks, traveling and covering their tracks and looking for new methods of being traced. And they change their names, change their lives, are prepared for the upheaval of being new people again. This time, it sticks. They watch Lian graduate school, college, get married, have children of her own. And the media is inescapable - they learn very little about their old families lives, but not nothing. There are funerals and weddings and probably so much more in private, things they will never know, never be part of again. And then they’re just old and together. Their grandkids visit, Lian visits, life is good and long and they are happy.

• Or, it sticks until one day, a spell is cast in Gotham and he’s standing on a rooftop, no mask, identity on full display, surrounded by other vigilantes in mixed states of gear and civilian status. Some being or other from another universe required all hands on deck in this universe and had used a spell to summon them all here.

• Jason spotted Roy appearing near him on the rooftop, both of them stunned. No one had noticed them yet, but their moment of indecisiveness and a moment of pure awareness on the Batfam’s part, meant there would be an inescapable confrontation. Batman seemed to notice them first and looked to Jason, who shook his head. It appeared Batman was trying to talk to the person who had summoned them all here, to argue they should be sent back or ask if it was possible.

• Jason moved himself and Roy towards Batman, doing their best to avoid looking at any of the other vigilantes at all, including but especially family. They walked into a tense conversation.

• You must send them back, they are civilians.

• Batman, you of all people understand the threat we are up against, if the spell believes they are necessary to combat X then they were brought here.

• I understand perfectly well, I am telling you to send them back. Having them here is a security risk, not during the fight, but after. This is not your universe, things are different in ways you can’t know of, this is one of those circumstances.

• Jason and Roy approach, Roy tapping his shoulder in a way that means he’ll follow his lead.

• He announces, You are in violation of the Hempstead agreement. You have one hour to return us to our previous location before we are a security risk.

• They can hear intakes of breath around them, some of the arrow clan and bat clan have approached, uncertain of what exactly is happening, but not comforted by the fact that Batman seems to understand the situation without telling any of them. The argument continues, Jason standing just behind Roy, separating him from the group slowly forming around them, people pushing their way to the center to see their son or brother again. Their friends.

• A decision is reached, It will take me 10 minutes to establish a connection strong enough to send them both through. Do not interrupt me while I prepare, follow me.

• And Jason and Roy are walking away, backs turned to their families. To their friends. There are shouts behind them, their names, other things they choose not to hear. It is all held at bay by Batman.

• They are speaking with the universe hopper, giving him a location to send them while clearly stating that he is not to give out that location to any of the vigilantes here, that violation of these terms will risk the hero community at large. The closer it gets to the ten minute mark, the more the riot behind them frays between silent understanding and desperation. Neither of them turns around, they can’t allow themselves to look. It is excruciating.

• Roy looks Jason in the eye and neither of them are fully able to stand it, but the fact that they’re not alone has to be enough. Jason can see the itch start, the overwhelming feeling that can’t be tolerated, the one that motivates people to seek out something that will just stop. He reaches out his hand, taps it against Roy’s and is met with one of the worst smiles he’s ever seen. It threatens to bring Jason to his knees, but Roy threads their hands together. The portal opens before them and without turning around, they step through.

• There is a shared panic attack, a moment of grief and regret where both of them realize just how greatly they hurt all of the people they used to care about. They break apart together and rebuild each other enough to pick up Lian from school and begin the process of torching their home. Whatever fight they had been summoned for had not happened yet, so they had a larger lead time than they had when Bruce had stumbled across them. But now, the entire hero community, many more points of being able to be convinced, was now aware they were both alive and on Earth.

[marionmorse]

Give me that one time Batman and Superman merge in that one world's finest comic where they're fighting Hal, but make it just an overwhelming realization to clark that bruce's brain never SHUTS THE FUCK UP!!!!

Clark: Ha ha wow, that doberman in Keystone just got a bone, he sounds so happy right now :)

Bruce, in the span of about 3 seconds: if I get home before 5:30 i might be able to wedge in a half hour nap before getting ready for patrol, first thing's first I need to visit Arkham because Harvey has been acting strange lately and frankly I can't take any more from him, also Dick's birthday is tomorrow I need to remember to go to bludhaven before morning because that one bakery sells out of those kolaches we share a box of in about an hour after opening. also I need to remember to place a new fabric order for that one cape design Alfred suggested. everything hurts. my city is burning. i love my family.

Clark, instantly overstimulated: p....pupy...

[shelfperson]

love danlou so fucking much who is doing it like them? no one. imagine the most beautiful girl in the world, a modern helen of troy, suitors falling for her left-and-right. imagine the prettiest girl in the world tenderly hand-feeds her hideous pet worm little apple slices every day and gives him little kisses every day and makes him a little worm house to live in. and the worm is constantly begging the most beautiful girl in the world to love HIM, a WORM, more than both of her ex-husbands AND her dead daughter. and the prettiest girl in the world says "heehee maybe 😊💞" every single time.

[broareweabouttoviberightnow]

sometimes I think a lil too hard about the greasers n 'we were boys together. don't that count for nothin at all?' n I get a lil sick to my stomach.

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

pez dispenser debris for the fic ask thing? 👀

As much as this is my “kill no darlings you will get EVERY flashback” fic, there’s overarching sociopolitical backstory explaining why Izuku and the rest of class 3A exploded in the public eye that I don’t think I’ll ever fully fit in.

It’s a combination of it being more of a meta analysis than anything and also requiring information from a perspective that I know will never appear in the fic. Like, the fic still gets the different moments that make up this analysis, but there’s no explicit connecting thread to show how they all locked together to create this sort of global cult following of class 3-A. I almost put in a little fake news article opinion piece that was meant to sort of walk the reader through why society is Like This, but I decided it was too heavy handed and deleted it.

Everything that I’m going to reference has already appeared in pez dispenser debris to some degree, and none of it will ever actually materially impact the plot. They may receive a little more detail down the line if they’re mentioned in passing in the fic, so out of an abundance of caution, I’ll stick it below the cut so people can avoid this, but I don’t personally consider any of this spoilers.

Izuku and the rest of the class are famous in pez dispenser debris in a way that’s pretty much unprecedented for students. Canonically, not even all might had a name for himself until after his graduation. Pretty much everyone from class 3A are public figures, with Izuku specifically being considered a major global figure.

In my mind, there was this perfect storm right during their second year that catapulted them into fame. The class personally has varying levels of awareness of why they got so popular, but there was this perfect cross winds of societal unrest and fear that made them household names.

There was an approximately one month span in their second year where they were just hit one after another with a major firestorms of events: The UA Sports Festival, the Sidekick Strike, and the Tartarus Prison Break/Desertion of Yokohama.

The UA Sports Festival is the one that the kids attribute this most to, because so many of the news articles that followed referenced their performance in it. But it probably gave them less mileage than what the other two events did.

What the UA Sports Festival did was showcase their skills to the world in a venue designed to show them off. The public was already on edge. All Might had retired, crime rates kept going up, and people were rapidly losing confidence in existing heroes. Class 2A made such an insane showing of skill in the second Sports Festival that it made the public rave about them for weeks after. It was extremely reassuring to Japan that they had such powerful heroes in the barrel and would soon be on the streets. But that attention probably would have died down had it not been for the Sidekick Strike and Yokohama.

The Sidekick Strike actually had nothing to do with them. But it undermined the public’s faith in heroes at just the right time.

The Sidekick Strike is just one of those things that I have no POV that would even tangentially be involved in it so we’ll get a few passing references in media clips and it’ll never be discussed in depth. Which is a shame because it’s such an interesting conflict to me.

The Sidekick Strike was heavily inspired by the 1919 Boston Police Strike. Effectively, it was the height of the labor rights movement, and police officers got together and went on strike to get the police union recognized. They had tried to negotiate and negotiations failed, and so they all walked off the job. The city descended into lawlessness, the national guard was deployed, it was a whole thing. Famously, Calvin Coolidge fired the entire police force over it on the grounds that there was no striking from public safety.

I thought it would be really interesting if there was something similar that happened with the sidekicks. The thing is that the heroics structure as it stands really incentivizes abuse towards sidekicks. We have a society where there’s a decent amount of heroes who are only in it for the fame. A not insignificant amount of money must come from marketing deals. And it’s a ranked system, so they’re all in competition with each other.

Heroes wouldn’t be incentivized to showcase their sidekicks—they’d be incentivized to take advantage of them and take credit for their work.

Like, think about the work-study experiences. Momo didn’t even officially work for the hero she studied with. She wasn’t getting paid. An adult woman used her for a shampoo ad. Who wants to bet whether Momo saw a dime from it? It’s probably very predatory because the nature of the system incentivizes predation.

I thought the underlying legal issues would be interesting and complex. Who owns a sidekick’s image—the agency or the individual? Who gets the proceeds of their brand deals? This all would be governed by their employment contracts, and sidekicks just starting out have very little leverage compared to big name heroes. And those heroes would want to keep their sidekicks names small and theirs big. The rankings are competitive, after all.

It’s a situation where I do think that like. The sidekicks would have a point in unionizing. The use of their image, appropriate compensation, and proper credit for their busts would all be like, very legitimate concerns in a normal employment context.

I see agencies like Idaten settling immediately with the union and having their sidekicks back on the street before the day is out. In my mind, idaten is considered the gold standard for sidekick jobs already, and their employees mostly did it out of solidarity with the people they worked alongside of. Like, Idaten was already doing most of the union’s demands and signed off very quickly on the remaining ones. If it was just about the Idaten sidekicks, none of them would have gone on strike, but they had a lot of colleagues who they depended on in the field who were in terrible situations. What were they gonna say, sorry, sucks to be you, I got a great gig though so condolences? These were the people keeping them alive. They went on strike because they knew Idaten would publicly settle before the day was out and set an example for the rest of the agencies. Hopefully it would help other agencies follow their lead.

But that didn’t happen. Some agencies, like Endeavor’s, fired everyone immediately. And I think a lot of agencies spent a long time picking over every line item in prolonged negotiations. It dragged out.

And that went over fucking terribly.

All Might just retired. Crime is up. And their sworn defenders are bickering over who gets what cut of the action figure line. Like I think the public would have fucking hated this in a post-All Might world. It would have seemed like the only real hero just medically and irreversibly retired and the rest of them are squabbling about whose turn it is in the spotlight.

I also think that the villains would have taken advantage of it.

The Tartarus Prison Break in pez isn’t the one that happened in canon. Here, the League of Villains attacked Tartarus and set everyone loose. In the process, they made a very clear stance: they are going to leave with All for One, and they are not going to attack any civilians. They won’t fight at all unless attacked first.

All of the horrible and sadistic villains they just let go have not made the same promise.

They chose to do this now because of the Sidekick Strike. All their heroes don’t give a fuck about protecting them, so they’re strapped for staffing. So they’re taking back their leader and going back to ground, and the heroes are free to immediately go after and contain all those bad bad villains who just escaped. And those guys are headed to the heavily populated mainland, so better be quick.

The whole world knew that was their explicit reasoning and promise. Because Himiko fucking lived tweeted the escape.

The Sidekick Strike took the hit for a lot of the blame, but I do see all the sidekicks breaking strike lines to go respond to the crisis. But response times were severely handicapped by the fact that most if not all of them were cut off from their agencies. It was just a complete systemic breakdown.

And then there became the question of what crisis do you respond to: All for One’s escape, or everyone else’s?

I mentioned in one of the little fake tumblr posts that the Tartarus Prison Break was seen as Endeavor’s greatest failure. And part of that is because he chose to sacrifice the nearby area, Yokohama, to contain All for One.

I am one of the biggest haters of Endeavor’s later arc, specifically because it required going back on the nature of the abuse he had subjected his family to that was already established in canon, but that’s a different rant. This is not canon endeavor. I hate what they did with canon endeavor.

That being said, I do think that the self doubt weighed on him once he became number one. And this was the moment of his career where it really crushed him.

All for One had escaped. So had every other villain from Tartarus. He should go after the most immediate threats. He knew this. It was basic triage.

But they would never have a better chance to stop All for One.

Prisoners in Tartarus aren’t exactly hitting all their macros and micros or training daily. They are not adherents to the Bakugou Katsuki Fitness Lifestyle. All for One was coming off spending the last few months drugged up to his eyeballs and strapped to a chair in a straitjacket with at least fifty guns pointed at him at all times. The man has not scratched his own nose in weeks. He’s weaker now than he’ll ever be again.

It was their best chance.

If he escaped, and he went back to ground, he’d have the time and space to get as strong as he wanted, and then he’d come back for real. And he’d be coming back for everything.

Stopping him the first time had cost them All Might.

And Endeavor simply was not All Might. And he still wouldn’t be All Might when the next fight came.

It really was the hardest decision of Endeavor’s life. He had to admit to himself that his own inadequacy was going to cost them countless lives. But he thought it was a hard decision he had to make. He was losing the battle for the barest chance at winning the war.

So he made the call that all heroes were to respond to All for One. They had to hit the league of villains now with their full force if they were to stand a chance. They could not afford to divide their already sparse forces. They’d respond to Yokohama when AfO was contained.

He was also the one who made the call to broadcast the warning message that we hear in the Twitter post. He thought it would give civilians their best chance. He didn’t want them to act with the expectation of the heroes being en route.

Of course, that meant that the entire city got fucking sirens going off and a message telling them that the heroes were not going to save them. Which, as you can expect, did not do a lot for public morale.

In my head, Tartarus is like, the equivalent to Gotham’s Arkham. It’s borderline an institute for the criminally insane. You don’t end up there unless you did something super fucked, are super dangerous, and have extreme violent tendencies. It’s exclusively for the most dangerous and indiscriminately violent criminals in the country.

The entire world was watching in real time while the tragedy unfolded. A lot of people were livestreaming after the emergency broadcast dropped, because they didn’t want the government to be able to handwave away how terrible their death was, or because they didn’t know what else to do, or because they just didn’t want to be alone. The full expectation was that it’d be a massacre.

But it wasn’t. Because Class 2-A responded instead.

The Class 2-A defensive efforts were discussed in one of the silly little fake tumblr posts and in the fake twitter post. In those, we find out that 1) Class 2-A, along with Lemillion, Suneater, and Nejire responded to the scene; 2) the entire class rolled out of Mirio’s fucking mom van and tamaki and nejire’s cars like they were fucking clown cars; 3) the HPSC claimed it was a legitimate operation blessed and coordinated by them; and 4) a lot of people think this was a lie, in part because videos leaked of Aizawa bitching them all out in the street afterwards. We also see Izuku’s green lightning at the end of the twitter video, showing him responding to the scene just as the first villains hit the mainland.

This fight has a lot of names in the backstory that lives in my head. It’s called the Tartarus Prison Break for obvious reasons. It’s also been called in some circles the Desertion of Yokohama, because of the call Endeavor made.

But it’s also called the Battle of Yokohoma. And it’s ranked alongside the Battle of Kamino as one of the finest acts of modern day heroics. And that’s because of Class 2-A. If it hadn’t been for them showing up, it would have gone down in history as the Massacre of Yokohama.

Like. It kills me that I can’t include the full details of what happened, but there’s just too much to make in a flashback. It’s a fic in and of itself. But it really was the fight that made Class 2-A.

It was the first fight where they were really the only heroes that could be counted on. Granted, they’d had to fight for their lives alone, but this wasn’t just their lives. These were thousands of terrified civilians who all thought they were going to die.

It was the first true test of them as heroes in the world. And they actually rose to the occasion. They didn’t just fight the villains—they realized that they needed to get emergency services working throughout the city if everyone was going to make it. Momo and Tsuyu conducted a mildly hostile take over of the emergency call center so they could coordinate relief. They had fucking Tokoyami and Dark Shadow single-handedly holding the line on the hospital while Kaminari, Shoji, Jiro, and Sato all learned to drive for the Very First Time while commandeering the city’s fucking ambulances. They were fighting and containing villains, performing emergency aid, putting out literal fires, everything. It was the hardest fight of their lives.

There was a hot second where Class 2-A was The Moment. Like. The entire world was watching them during this fight, and they had no fucking idea until it was over. People lost their minds when the first footage made it out of Yokohama of a bunch of teenagers showing up and immediately throwing hands with S-Class villains.

It was global news. Think of the kind of media attention that was received by the search for the Titan, the Tham Luang Cave Rescue, the Suez Canal getting blocked by the Ever Given (rip queen you will always be famous to me), that kind of thing. Class 2-A was fighting for their fucking lives and then found out three days later while they were all still in the hospital that there was a prayer vigil going on in Portugal for them during the battle and CNN had 24 hours live coverage of the fight that had so many viewers it outnumbered the population of Finland. Like what do you even do with that information.

The world expected a massacre. They didn’t expect a bunch of footage of high schoolers kicking the shit out of superpowered murders and personally ferrying the injured to the hospitals they were also defending.

The other part about this fight that really made them permanently part of the public consciousness is that it was not lost on everyone that every single person who responded to that fight did so at the risk of their license.

All of them had provisional licenses, save Lemillion, Suneater, and Nejire, all of whom went AWOL from the explicit directives ordering them to respond to the fight against All for One. The operation could not have been less authorized. They had to steal their gear and jimmy the UA fence to even get out. The explicit plan was to steal one of the UA buses and have Bakugou fucking drive them to the fight (he also did not know how to drive but he seemed the most likely of them to break literally every single motor vehicle code to get them there but still be naturally talented at it enough to not kill them) but Izuku told Mirio what bullshit they were up to and Mirio, who was with Tamaki and Nejire when the news broke, immediately decided he would be on that bullshit too and pulled up in his mom van.

In my mind, there were strict rules around provisional licenses and how they could be used, and they broke pretty much all of them to respond to Yokohama. It would have been grounds to revoke their provisionals and permanently bar them from heroics. Lemillion, Suneater, and Nejire could have all lost their licenses for helping them and for going AWOL.

The HPSC fucking fell over themselves to legitimatize the entire operation. They knew they were utterly fucked if they didn’t. These kids already had murals being painted of their faces in other fucking countries. There was a little old lady in Kyoto livestreaming herself working overtime to embroider Iida’s face onto a cushion because that lovely young man saved her darling granddaughter from *checks notes* horrible and painful death directly caused by the failings of the current HPSC administration. There were multiple trending posts online agreeing to fucking riot if those kids got in trouble for this.

Every single actual hero in the immediate vicinity of this disaster had responded to fight a villain who wasn’t actually attacking anyone. And then they fucking lost. They publicly broadcast a message saying Good Luck Champs Because We’re Not Going To Save You. It was an actual PR nightmare that they had a bare chance of salvaging if they just latched onto these kids like an aggressive parasite and that is exactly what they did.

They totally knew. Actually, it was a joint operation coordinated by and between UA and and the HPSC. Why would the kids be in trouble?? They had responded because the HPSC told them to.

UA gave it a week of dead silence and then issued a short statement praising the bravery of their students in a recent HPSC approved mission, and then they never said another word about it. They didn’t have any choice but to go along with the HPSC’s story. If they contradicted them, all of class 2-a would find their licenses pulled by the end of the day, and lord knows they wouldn’t wait for the court of public opinion to work its magic and would just all go out and become fucking vigilantes, because why not. Aizawa has aged 100 years since he got this class. Every single day he thinks of how it was a 50/50 shot between him and Vlad.

No one in the class is fully aware of just how famous they were in the immediate aftermath, because the school bent over backwards to try and shield them from it as much as possible. Like, they have an idea, but none of them saw the full explosion firsthand because of just how hard the school worked to keep it from them. Aizawa confiscated the internet router and told them it was punishment for whatever the fuck they did to the buses (thank god Mirio was just as crazy as them because they were NOT GOOD at hotwiring cars) but really it was to try and insulate them from it a little bit. Like. Japan’s Imperial Family wanted to do an official visit. The White House offered to host them. They received interview requests from every major talk show on the planet. Buzzfeed wanted to do a puppy interview with them.

Right now, Aizawa’s terrified for Midoriya’s graduation, but in the aftermath of that, he was breathing into a paper bag about all of them. Society had sort of latched onto them like they were the last life raft on the titanic. All for One was back, and All Might wasn’t, and the heroes had publicly broadcast a message saying they were useless, but don’t fucking worry, fifteen year old Iida Tenya is on the case. Society will be upheld by Kaminari Denki, currently viral for driving a real life city ambulance one hundred miles per hour down the street while screaming “WEE WOO BITCH.” And don’t forget the pillar that will be Mina Ashido, who rushed over to him earlier that day to show him her extra sparkly pink nails. And if you have a major fight that needs to be won? Don’t fucking worry, just send out bone-breaking boy wonder Midoriya Izuku and his equally reckless brother Toogata Mirio, because their dumbasses managed to take down an S-Class villain team that only All Might could defeat the first time around. Don’t worry about the multi week hospitalization they needed after, because that’s an acceptable burden to put on children.

When Aizawa started this job, he promised himself he would never send a student out to die. Some of them would die. But it would be tragedy, not damnation. He’d have given them their best chance. Part of the reason why he made that promise was because he sort of felt like his teacher sent him out set up to die, and it’s only luck that he made it through his first couple of years.

He has gone to the funeral of every single student he has ever had who did not make it. He goes back to their graves every year.

He was fucking petrified after Yokohama that society would push these kids too far too soon. Every single one of his classes before them had gotten the benefit of being practically unknown their first few years. They didn’t have the world talking about them like they were already the top heroes. He was terrified they wouldn’t have the space to learn and grow when they started.

A lot of teachers would have tried to mine the notoriety of Yokohama to hard launch their students’ careers. Aizawa told Nedzu point blank that he would quit tomorrow if he did not help him quash this thing as much as possible, and nedzu agreed.

This world killed its real heroes. It sucked them dry and left them like All Might, and he just needed fucking time. He needed fucking time to let them be kids and maybe they’d survive.

Izuku ended up being the one who escaped the aftermath of everything the least. His Quirk was too much like All Might’s for the world to let go of him easily.

And then Stain got fucking dogpiled by idaten in the aftermath of the Tartarus prison break and implied he considered Izuku the only true hero in the absence of all might and everyone started asking super inconvenient questions like “how does stain even know you exist” and “no really he called you by your actual legal name how does he even know that” and it just. It didn’t help things. Izuku’s suffering.

So yeah. There was just this absolute collision of a total lack of faith in current heroes combined with a huge swell of public trust in class 2-a that led us to being in the landscape we are now. All of the currently licensed heroes said that they wouldn’t be there to save the public, and then Class 2-A immediately hit back that they would be there. Actually, they’ll risk everything to be there. They’ll die to protect the public and they’ll risk the entire future they had been trying to build and they will fucking be there to save them.

There’s a lot of people that never forgave the heroes for deserting Yokohama. And there’s even more people who have absolute faith in Izuku and his classmates because they didn’t. That’s why the world is watching them so aggressively. These kids are the most trusted heroes in Japan right now.

I wish I could fit in more about what happened, because I love this backstory so much, but 1) some of it absolutely requires POVs like Endeavors, which we won’t get in pez dispenser debris, 2) there’s no one POV that could tell the full story via flashback and 3) it’d just be too long of a divergence. Like. It really is a whole fic of its own. I’d love to write it one day but I probably won’t have the time

[drdrizzey]

Shout out to the artists that still make SCP staff/doctors fanarts or SCP fanarts in general, but not fanarts of the most popular anomalies of the website but ancient lore and characters, as well as Creepypasta fanarts, and I don't mean Jeff the killer, I mean the nichest unknown ones that have been forgotten since 2017, and old ARGs, especially Marble hornets fanarts, y'all are the real MVPs, never stop, I could not keep living without y'all. You're like archeologists but creating new dinosaur bones, a wonder.

[blackthorn-faerie]

As an Aventurine kinnie, I love the trope of Aventurine repressing his feelings for Ratio, not letting him get too close or attached because he feels like he isn’t worth love/is afraid that the people he loves will get taken from him. However, hear me out, what if he decided to love Ratio with everything in him out of spite? He’s lost everything, doesn’t even own himself, but he has this. Logically, it would never work, which is exactly why he’s going to love Ratio as hard as he can.

[prince-rowan-of-the-forest]

Hey guys

Just letting yall know that the only way a fandom dies is if we let it

Keep creating shit and it won't die that's just how this works the original content doesn't matter people are making shit for stuff thats never going to get more content

Y'all don't need a continuous feed of source content to keep a fandom 'alive' just look at like

A lot of fucking fandoms

[zukkaoru]

i actually literally cannot fathom why so many people are always up in arms about not seeing dazai and chuuya for several chapters. i love them and would consider both of them to be in my top favorite bsd characters, but not once since the pov switched back to yokohama have i ever been upset that we're not seeing what's happening with them right now. i don't think it's necessary to go back to them at the moment; they're not the focus right now. it is absolutely baffling to me that so many people are genuinely angry over the pov being with the main character for several chapters in a row. you guys don't care about a good story; you just want fanservice.

[dontyoulistentome]

Not Ekko grieving the same girl like 3 times