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On Heteromorphs and Heteromorphobia (Arc XXI-B + Conclusion, Final War-B: The Hospital Attack)

To preface before I start documenting these final four chapters, there’s been a lot said (not least by me) about how wildly out of touch the resolution to this plotline is. While I didn't set out to rehash all of that again, it turns out I can't actually talk about how the series portrays heteromorphobia without talking about how it resolves it—if I'd wanted to do that, the place to stop would have been with the last post. This whole piece is also destined for AO3 eventually, so it needs to be readable for those who don't follow me on tumblr. Therefore, if you've been following my #heteromorph discrimination plot posts for a while, there are portions of this post that will be pretty familiar territory!

If you're new and want my full breakdowns, you can find them in my Chapter Thoughts posts or in this pair of posts rounding up the asks I’d gotten on the topic. Here, I will simply say that I don’t think Horikoshi’s fumbling of the plot can be read to mean that all the stuff I’ve documented thus far was just me reaching too hard, reading stuff into the manga where nothing was intended. While I’m sure some of it is—I definitely went out on a few limbs!—I think the main answer to, “How can heteromorphobia be such a well-thought-out depiction of a logically foreseeable form of discrimination while also having such a terrible resolution?” is, “Because the mainstream opinion about how best to handle discrimination is wildly different in Japan than it is in progressive American circles.”

That doesn’t mean I’m willing to wave the wand of Cultural Differences over this resolution and forgive everything—there were plenty of Japanese fans critiquing it as well![1]—but it does somewhat modulate my feelings about it. In any case, let’s get to it.

1: Most of what I saw was on Twitter, but there’s a Japanese site called bookmeter that’s kinda goodreads-esque, and which had several critical reviews posted for the volume, including one that felt like every point laid out was something I’d complained about as well. Super validating, but a shame it was necessary!

(I'll be changing up my formatting just a bit in hopes that I can find a way to present sub-sub-bullet points that tumblr won't choke on in this 13K post. Pray for me.)

Chapter 370:

O We open with a scene which we’re led to believe is about Spinner but which the end of the chapter will reveal to be about Shouji. It’s shockingly open about the extent of the discrimination Shouji faced, and there’s worse yet to come, but here we find people throwing stones at him, telling him to die, saying he has dirty blood that will defile the land, that he should stay inside the house, and that no matter how much time passes,[2] they will never accept “his kind.”

2: Viz renders this as “no matter how much society progresses,” but the word jidai means something more like “the times”/”the age,” and the progression term used can mean improvement, but in the circumstances, probably just means forward movement. I think the intention is more like, “No matter how much the times march on,” if only because it would be very odd for the people yelling this vitriol to frame it as themselves resisting progression. After all, bigots don’t typically think of themselves as “regressive” compared to everyone else’s progressiveness; they think of themselves as normal or valuing tradition compared to everyone else’s moral laxity/perversity.

So, remember how I talked about the spiritual/religious charge to the language the CRC used to talk about their “sanctuary” and the League/Spinner’s presence in it? Here’s the full scope of that. It’s about kegare, a Shinto concept of uncleanliness associated particularly with blood and death, and while that’s normally something that can be purified simply by undergoing the proper ritual cleansings, when something is, in itself, intrinsically unclean, no amount of purification will fix it; you can only keep it sealed away. Hence the yelling at Shouji not to leave the house.

The spirituality-based discrimination calls to mind the burakumin, originally an outcaste group of people who made their living working with all the aspects of life Shinto considered kegare—butchers, tanners, executioners and the like. They were made to dress and cut their hair in ways that identified them on sight, barred from entering temples or schools, and lived in their own villages. The laws mandating much of this were abolished in 1871[3] and urban sprawl gradually rolled over burakumin villages, turning them into slum areas. While today it’s not uncommon for people to not even know they’re descended from burakumin lineage unless they’re specifically told,[4] more subtle discrimination does endure. While it’s clearly not the only inspiration, there’s a lot about anti-burakumin bias that’s reflected in heteromorphobia.

3: Albeit not without considerable and violent protests against the liberation of the burakumin/the idea that they were henceforth to be allowed to hold other occupations and become ordinary citizens. Arson, destruction of villages, attacks and deaths—all things considered, the anti-Kaihourei riots are probably a decent place to look for inspiration on the historical massacres Spinner’s #2 will be talking about shortly.

4: Or find out because someone who knows the significance of those old neighborhoods finds out first and they’re suddenly on the bad end of some discriminatory act or another.

O We find out that the group Spinner’s leading consists of fifteen thousand people, that number split between PLF remnants and ordinary civilians who support the PLF’s cause. It’s unknown exactly how that split breaks down, but based on how the rest of the attack goes, I think it’s probable that the group is mostly civilians—if it were more PLF, it probably wouldn’t be so wholly defanged by Shouji’s big plea for peace. So that’s what we might call a “bad look,” that fifteen thousand ordinary civilians feel so incredibly hard done-by that they not only flock to join a known terrorist, but that they do so for the purpose of attacking a hospital.

O They’re opposed by about two hundred police and heroes, the relevant of whom for our purposes are Present Mic, Rock Lock, Officer Gori, Shouji, and Koda. With the exception of Present Mic, who will in any case be heading inside very shortly, they’re all minorities of some sort, with Rock Lock being very visibly, obviously Black, and the others being heteromorphs. None of them are immediately thinking about the composition of the crowd, but rather about how difficult the crowd is being to handle.

O Rock Lock yells out that the rioters are too organized to be some random mob, a dismissiveness that gets him shouted at by the Spinner fanboys—tragically their only appearance in all of this!—that, “Folks with human faces just don’t get it!” I have to assume that putting Rock Lock in this scene is no accident, but rather is there to make the rioters come off as short-sighted, so deep in their own pain that they lash out at someone who, if HeroAca!Japan is anything like present day Japan, almost certainly understands better than they think!

The phrasing, in any case, points towards the dehumanization that heteromorphs, especially animal-associated ones, are subject to. After all, as Re-Destro might point out, in the post-Advent world, isn’t it the case that any given heteromorphic human’s face, no matter how strange it may be, is de facto a “human face”? Yet the vitriol from the Spinner fans clearly reflects how internalized it’s become for them, that they don’t look “human,” despite the fact that “looking human” means nothing at all in the time of quirks.

O Koda gets called a traitor by an elderly beaked heteromorph from, apparently, a rural area, underscoring what’s been alluded to a few times prior to this, and which will be laid out explicitly in a few pages, that heteromorphobia is far, far worse in the countryside than it is in the cities. Mr. Beak assumes—correctly, it seems[5]—that Koda’s a city kid, because why else other than ignorance would a fellow heteromorph stand against them?

5: Koda’s from Iwate Prefecture, which is only above Hokkaido in terms of population density; a bit of research suggests that its largest city, Morioka, is considered to be a mid-sized city. So that’s definitely the hard upper limit on exactly how “big city” Koda could reasonably be. That said, Shouji also identifies Koda as someone who grew up in a city, for which I assume he must have at least some basis.

O Spinner’s #2 fulfills the promise of his early shorthanded characterization of being a fiery, well-spoken zealot by standing on top of a building over the mob and exhorting them onward with revolutionary, inflammatory rhetoric. And boy, does he bring up a lot to talk about!

Demagoguery for Fun & Profit

O Quirk counselling and quirk education? Phony nonsense, he says. That’s a fairly confusing grievance to bring up in this context, so let’s consider what he might have in mind.

• For quirk education, I would contend that BNHA has shown very little of it, in spite of having Academia right there in the title. The academics in question are about Heroics, after all, not quirks in and of themselves. Here’s the complete list of what I would say the reader has seen that could be qualified as actual education about quirks:

Aizawa telling the kids(/low tier villains at USJ) some broad generalities, things like a very basic explanation of how quirks work on the genetic level or how they’re classified. Most of this is delivered in the context of how his quirk works; the only outlier that immediately comes to mind for me is his explanation of how quirks are like muscles, and can be strengthened via training.

Mirio and Tamaki’s middle school class doing “quirk training,” which is framed as a P.E. class and is specifically aimed at finding ways for each kid to be “useful to society,” not about them learning anything about quirks in a broader sense.

Endeavor’s recent reference to Nedzu’s alleged “quirk morality education,” about which I have already registered my skepticism.

The bit in Re-Destro’s monologue to Shigaraki where he mentions he was taught not to judge others by their quirks. It’s hard to judge how applicable this is to normal society because Re-Destro was raised in a cult, and the book shown during this sequence was released by Curious’s publisher.

So of those options, what is #2 talking about? I’d say the last one is probably closest to what he means: don’t judge others by their quirks. But of course, people judge others by their quirks all the time. Family, classmates, teachers, people in the same neighborhood, heroes and police—we see examples from literally the first page of characters who are being judged by their quirks or lack thereof. While that judgement doesn’t apply only to heteromorphs, they are, by dint of their visibility, going to face it everywhere they go, regardless of whether any given situation—say, going to the grocery store or on a date—involves quirks or not. So, whatever lessons people in this society are getting about quirks and judgement, they clearly aren’t absorbing them.

It also bears pointing out, of course, that #2’s personal affiliation is with the Metahuman Liberation Army, and he definitely shows signs—as I’ll get to in a bit—of the quirk supremacism that group is so unanimously painted with in the endgame. So while the supremacy he’s preaching is about heteromorphs rather than quirks more generally, he could well be saying quirk education is phony because he’s all for judging people on their quirks! However, his criteria for that judgement differs from both forms of judgement taught by the society he’s railing against—what they practice and what they preach.

• Then there’s quirk counseling, a practice the story most prominently associates with Toga, who’s barely a twitch of the needle away from baseline (though her abuse is not wholly without reference to her appearance, in that her natural smile is repeatedly branded as scary or deviant). So why bring it up in association with heteromorphs? My suspicion is that a heteromorph—especially a heteromorph with an animal-associated quirk!—being visibly “different” in some way makes the people around them hyper-sensitive to behavioral “deviations.”

For a start, you see that hyper-sensitivity brought to bear against Toga. Curious contends that Toga’s sense of “admiration” was a perfectly normal thing, but it was the tie to blood that made it wholly unacceptable. It’s notable that, before she snapped, Toga was never shown to actually want to hurt people: the bird was already injured when she found it, her friend got a scrape the way any child might, Saito was involved in a fight Toga had no hand in. She hurts people now because a lifetime of rejection and dehumanization, but Toga’s admiration of blood was not intrinsically indicative that she’d grow up to be violent; people treated it that way because of cultural attitudes towards blood and blood-attraction.

So, might the same sort of thing be true of e.g. animal-associated heteromorphs? That they might exhibit behaviors which would, in different circumstances, be totally fine, but which they’re judged for unduly harshly because of cultural beliefs about the animal they resemble? Let me just spitball a few possibilities:

A cat heteromorph who, as a child, showed affection by nuzzling. That’s fine when a literal kitten is doing it, and funny and cute when a baseline child sees a cat doing it and imitates it for fun, but when the cat heteromorph does it, he makes people uncomfortable, makes them wonder if he lacks self-control, comes off as weird and too-forward. So his parents rebuke him and bring him to a quirk counsellor to break him of the habit, leading him to feel ashamed and alienated from a harmless natural impulse.

A snake-headed girl is the first heteromorph in her family line and the way she stares at people so fixedly, never blinking, creeps them out, makes them feel like she’s dangerous. She isn’t and has no intention of being so, but she’s sent to quirk counselling anyway and the lesson she learns is to just never look people in the eye at all.

A condor heteromorph develops a morbid interest in corpses in middle school. He doesn’t want to eat them, he’s not some kind of cannibalistic animal—at least that’s what he told himself before quirk counselling, where his counsellor, like his teachers, assumed that his interest had to be tied to animal instincts. He wanted to be a mortician, or join the police and get into crime scene investigation, but when he told people that they just looked at him like he was already holding a fork and knife. (He ends up getting into photography, and just has to live with the fact that now people have two excuses to call him a vulture.)

Two children—one with a plant-based emitter quirk, the other an eight-eyed spider heteromorph—are caught in the act of killing some insects by a local police officer. It’s the sort of innocent childhood cruelty you might find anywhere, and, indeed, when the officer calls their school about it, that’s what gets decided about the emitter—he was just a child who didn’t know any better. But the heteromorph gets recommended for quirk counselling instead—after all, spiders kill insects. What if this is an early warning sign for instincts towards predatory behavior? It’s important to nip these things in the bud.

That’s all off the top of my head or taken from some conversation with friends on the topic, and maybe it’s a reach, but it’s also a very plausible explanation for why a heteromorphic idealogue might bring up quirk counselling as a specific grievance—because, like the Villain-designation for criminals, it’s unevenly and unfairly applied.

O The next point #2 makes, and definitely the one that made the biggest splash in fandom at the time, is his invocation of a pair of historical incidents, possibly both but at least one of which was a mass murder targeting heteromorphs, carried out by a bunch of baseline types. He names them as the 6/6 Incident and the Great Jeda Purge. These are both stealth Star Wars references, though the former is disguised a bit better by being in the same format that Japan sometimes uses for naming events like attempted coups.[6] Given the image we see, it’s fair to assume the event in BNHA was similar.

6: See for example the May 15 Incident or the February 26 Incident, called the 5・15 Incident and the 2・26 Incident respectively in Japan. You see this in China as well, with the Tiananmen Square massacre being referred to there as the 6/4 Incident.

Notice that the perpetrators here are mostly holding weapons. Were they quirkless themselves, or were they avoiding using quirks such that they couldn’t be branded as Villains? Knowing the answer to that would give us a timeframe for this.

He goes on to declaim, on the basis of these events, that the history of the paranormal is one of persecution and oppression of those with “differing forms.”[7] The term in Japanese there is kotonaru katachi, 異なる形, which uses a different reading of the kanji in igyou (異形) and muscles in a verb conjugation, which has the effect of softening the harshness of 異 somewhat.[8] This would be a great catch-all term for those with heteromorphic bodies who might or might not have heteromorphic quirks[9] if it weren’t for the fact that literally the only person we ever hear using it is an anti-social zealot. No one on Team Hero ever makes this kind of distinguishment.

In any case, #2 is obviously over-simplifying to play to his audience—recall the baseline woman we saw back in that shot of Persecuted Early Quirk-Havers back in Chapter 59—but, as I’ve discussed extensively, being more visible does make one a more ready target. Also, of course, the presence of the CRC in the story lays the groundwork for this sort of historical horror story even long after the worst days of the Advent.

7: I provide my own translation here because the Viz one, “those who don’t fit the mold,” is vague to the point of uselessness.

8: The koto reading, as best I can tell, seems to be pretty rare, often tagged as archaic in words including it. The i reading is far more common, in words that denote wrongness, divergence, abnormality, and so on. But it may be less about the reading and more about the fact that adding the verb conjugation makes the term more of a descriptive phrase than a direct noun. As ever, take my talk about Japanese language minutiae with a grain of salt.

9: “Differing forms” is broad enough, however, that it could also be read as covering, say, people with amputations, congenital anomalies, or other sorts of non-quirk-related disfigurements from accidents or disease. As in real life, navigating the linguistic space between specificity and Othering can be tricky.

O Next, #2 rhetorically demands what excuse was given by those who perpetrated these slaughters? He answers his own question with the quote, “They give me the creeps.” Note how this ties in with my earlier suppositions about the likelihood of discrimination worsening the farther one is from baseline, as well as those about the necessity of putting up a good, positive, appealing front. It’s a perfectly intuitive leap, that more extreme variants of heteromorphy, or those who evoke negative associations—animals tied to rot or bad luck, people made wholly out of green ooze—are going to be more likely to be found “creepy” than those who look like e.g. sexy bunny girls or straight-laced guys who just happen to have pipes jutting out of their calves. Of course, that’s on something of a sliding scale; the more biased an area is against heteromorphs in general, the easier it will be to find oneself on the wrong side of that line.

O #2 presents the idea that society has reflected on their actions and made amends, or at least that’s how society’s narrative goes. Illustrating this, we see two of the three heteromorphs in the police force, as well as Nedzu. Interestingly, the panel does not include any heteromorphic heroes! I might guess that this is because heroes are meant to use their quirks to serve others; they’re really just enforcement tools, lacking any particular authority beyond a quirk-use license and some admittedly broad soft power courtesy of the social contract.[10] Conversely, a school principal and a police chief (Gori remaining the outlier here) have actual authority, such that the average heteromorphobia-denier can point to them as evidence that heteromorphobia doesn’t exist anymore.

10: Which is to say, I don’t get the impression civilians are required to take orders from heroes, such that they would actually get in legal trouble for disobeying. The fact that people do typically follow those orders speaks more to the power heroes wield via their association with the police force, as well as the general tendency of people to assume that someone in a uniform giving orders during an emergency is probably a professional whose orders it would be safe and wise to follow.

In the same panel, we also see a baseline guy palling around with a vaguely murine heteromorph dude (he looks more like a mascot suit mouse than an actual mouse, but he’s certainly nowhere close to baseline!), illustrating another way society wants to pretend it’s moved past heteromorphic discrimination. I can’t help but note, in regards to this specific pair, that the manga uses faces the readers know to illustrate the point about heteromorphs in positions of authority, whereas to make the point about baseline/heteromorph friendships, it has to make up a new pair to show us because the series hasn’t made the time to actually build any (heroic) relationships that actually look like that!

Now, one could argue that using familiar faces to underscore #2’s speech would imply that he’s aware of those faces, and while that’s fine for figures of authority, there’s no reason for him to be aware of e.g. Natsuo and his mousey girlfriend. However, the same would apply to anyone placed to demonstrate a random urban friendship crossing the “differing forms” line, including those two strangers. Who are those two, after all, that #2 is any more familiar with them than he would be of Natsuo and mouse gal?

Honestly, I think the best relationship candidate we have—a pair who would both communicate what the panel needs to communicate to the reader and who would feasibly be enough in the public eye to get pointed at for rhetorical purposes by an in-universe speaker—would be Kamui Woods and Mount Lady. Unfortunately, they don’t work because Horikoshi has never seen fit to actually reveal Kamui Woods’ real face, so they’re much less visibly “a baseline person being emotionally close with a heteromorph” than the random two Horikoshi made up.

O The oratory continues into discussing the divide between city versus rural views on heteromorphs, and this is, to me, the first clear sign that the series is beginning to lose the thread of this plot. Taking #2 at his word asks us to concede the heteromorphobia has been completely wiped out in cities, eradicated with that wonderful antidote called “education.” But discrimination very much does exist in cities! It may be less violent, less extreme, less vocal, but in the form of things like law enforcement bias, housing discrimination, microaggressions, the quirk counselling #2 himself brought up, it’s very much still there! Now, it could be that he’s just downplaying that discrimination to focus on the really ugly stuff you don’t see in cities, but I don’t know what his reasons for doing so would be? Not when there’s so much else he could say that would be equally inflammatory without alienating urban heteromorphs by dismissing their still very much present, modern suffering.

O He then brings up the talk of “light”—echoing Skeptic’s earlier rhetoric—and it not reaching those gathered at the hospital, so they must make their own, for people who’ve never once regretted the quirks they were born with can never be their heroes. What this primarily puts me in mind of is Hawks’s background with heroes prior to his father’s arrest—that heroes were only on TV, not present to save him in his actual life. Keep that in mind for Shouji’s response later on.

O Towards the end, #2’s speech finally tips over the line from what could plausibly be read as protesting unequal treatment to an outright call for supremacy. Notably, he doesn’t call for quirk supremacy, but rather for heteromorph supremacy—for the tables to be turned, the cards reversed, for them to not merely be equal, but rather to be superior.

It’s unclear how much of this he’s sincere about and how much is just convenient rhetoric disguising views that are more quirk supremacist in actuality. For many reasons, I want to read him in good faith: because the MLA originally struck me as being written in good faith throughout MVA and the first war arc; because #2 never once uses his quirk in this mini-arc, casting doubt on him having such an amazing quirk that he’d benefit overmuch from quirk supremacy anyway; and especially because it would be incredibly bad faith on Horikoshi’s part to make a character delivering a speech like this a total bad faith, manipulative outsider. Unfortunately, #2’s inner monologue in later chapters will make a good faith read all but impossible to sustain.

O Halfway through his speech, #2 unmasks himself, revealing both his face—dominated by four pairs of pedipalp-esque mouthparts, though the markings on his head are pretty eye-catching, too—and his scar. We’re never told how he got it, but the implication is certainly that he was attacked for his appearance. That may just be a conclusion it serves him to let people make, given his bad faith elsewhere, but thankfully the manga doesn’t go so far as to say that explicitly. In any case, his deliberate reveal turns his wound into a form of performance art, drawing attention to it, forcing it to be a part of the conversation—the polar opposite of Shouji covering his scars because he doesn’t want them to be a part of the conversation about him, and those scars being revealed because his mask is torn off against his will.[11]

11: This also fits a larger pattern of villains, by and large, choosing their expressions of vulnerability, making deliberate shows of agency in how their weakness is perceived by the broader world—Shigaraki taking his hand off for the first time, Dabi’s video, Toga approaching heroes with genuine questions, and so on. There are certainly exceptions, but generally if a villain shows his “true face,” it’s because they’re making a conscious decision to do so, and may be actively manipulating how that reveal is going to land. Conversely, heroes want to present a powerful, confident, untarnished image to the public, so their shows of vulnerability all have to be forced out of them after pitched battles or acts of violence. Heroes don’t make themselves vulnerable to the public on purpose, which feeds into the way the public then treats them when they are forced into vulnerable positions.

O Spinner’s a mess at this point, and the reason he’s a mess is all tied up in his faith in/desire to help Shigaraki. It’s not explicitly about heteromorphobia, but on the other hand, given that the thing that drove Spinner to be here at all was his horrifically low self-esteem caused by heteromorphobia, maybe it’s not so irrelevant after all. It may have taken Spinner longer than the Tenkos, Touyas, and Chisaki Kais of the world to reach the “fall victim to a dark influence due to the neglect and abuse you faced at the hands of Hero Society” plot, but he certainly got there in the end![12]

12: I call this The Sekoto Peak Problem, and it’s a big criticism of mine about how the final arc is framing all these conflicts as being solely brought about because Bad Faith Villain Men like AFO are scooping up vulnerable people and driving them towards violence, without acknowledging the much worse circumstances those vulnerable people might be in if they were just left to their fates. Touya, for example, if not for AFO’s timely rescue, would likely have simply died on the mountain long before Endeavor was able to find him.

O Shouji takes the mob to task for attacking a hospital without ensuring the safety of the uninvolved innocents within, a laughable bit of sophistry[13] that accurately foreshadows how disastrous his reasoning will be throughout the rest of these chapters.

13: It’s laughable sophistry firstly because the heroes knew this mob was coming but chose to leave Kurogiri at a hospital anyway; one can mount a very reasonable argument that Kurogiri’s teleportation power qualifies him as a military objective, which would make stashing him at a hospital an actual war crime in an international conflict, as well as negating the hospital’s protected status as a civilian object. It’s laughable sophistry secondly because it criticizes a Villain-led mob for failing to evacuate the building, as if said mob had exactly the same social cachet possessed by heroes, that they could freely walk in the front door of a hospital and start shouting evacuation orders with reasonable confidence that they’d be obeyed. Finally, it’s laughable sophistry because Shouji is quite simply wrong about the order of the actions he’s describing—the heroes’ evacuation of Ujiko’s hospital was concurrent with their invasion of said hospital, not precedent to it.

Chapter 371:

O Shouji accuses Spinner of taking actions that will set them back thirty years, which is just a really egregiously victim blamey sort of thing to say, placing the responsibility on heteromorphs for the crimes of those who hate them.

O Koda’s perspective gives us a flashback to Shouji telling his classmates about his history—his town and his scars and his reason for wanting to be a hero. It’s all material that works in the context of all the set-up we’ve gotten—the CRC and the religious inflection of their specific brand of hatred, the rural heteromorphobia, the hints about Shouji’s own discrimination, the attack on the Ordinary Woman, and so on—but that would have been far better served to have been integrated into the story more naturally. Koda has no specifically established relationship with Shouji (seriously, there is absolutely nothing; it’s shocking how out of nowhere his sudden deep dedication to Shouji is), nor does the scene he remembers have any specific flags for when it might take place,[14] leaving the memory feeling less like a natural extension of their arc than it is a graceless sequence muscled in to attempt to rouse some emotion in the audience when Koda has a quirk awakening he is not otherwise remotely in dire enough straits to have rightfully earned.[15]

14: Shouto and Bakugou being missing might suggest that they’re off at their remedial license course, which would put the scene somewhere in late September up through December (stretching from the aftermath of Overhaul to the introduction of the MLA), save that there are several other students missing as well—Sero, Iida, Sato, and Aoyama, none of whom where in the remedial course.

15: Nearly every other inarguable quirk awakening[※] we know of in the series has as a chief component serious physical injury: Bakugou, Ochaco, Toga. Geten’s is the only exception, and his is tied to the strength of his feelings for Re-Destro, which are clearly and overridingly his most significant character trait! Shouji is not anywhere near that central to Koda’s life, and he sure as hell isn’t injured enough to have gotten it that way.

※: By which measure I exclude stuff like the change in Shigaraki’s Decay or Mina’s acid attack against Gigantomachia. Shigaraki was explicitly just breaking through a mental block to access power he already had. Meanwhile, if Mina’s Plus Ultra moment had been a sudden quirk evolution, she wouldn’t already have an attack name picked out for it, nor would her horns have gone back to normal after it. Acidman: ALMA is an Ultimate Move, not Mina having a quirk awakening.

O The flashback itself calls for another subsection.

Ignoring the Difference Between the Personal and the Systemic for Fun & Profit

O The big thing here the description of the whole town coming out for a “blood cleansing” whenever Shouji touched someone. This is depicted as Shouji, probably a preteen in this sequence,[16] being savagely attacked with farming tools, the most visible of which is a pitchfork. This visual, as well as #2’s invocation of historical slaughters, is the darkest heart of heteromorphobia: a child being ritualistically assaulted in the open street as a matter of course, as a consequence for touching someone. This is the image you should hold in your mind as The Problem through all of the potential answers and responses that get trotted out through the rest of these chapters.

16: Visibly older/bigger than, say, Kouta, but also visibly younger/smaller than middle school Deku.

Before moving on, I do want to examine this image in just a bit more depth.

This is, firstly, the moment that Shouji got those scars, and it’s very important to note that what we’re being shown is likely not a random, representative sample of what the town “coming out in force for a blood cleansing” looks like. The strong implication is that this is in the immediate aftermath of the sequence we’ll see shortly of Shouji saving the girl from the river: he’s wearing the same clothes and shoes,[17] he’s the same size, and there’s a spray of blood from where he’s being struck across the mouth where he didn’t have his distinctive scars when he saved the girl. Does that mean the blood cleansings were typically not this violent? That’s hard to say. On the one hand, we don’t see any other scars on Shouji, and he wears his arms pretty bare! On the other hand, we never see any part of his body bare except his neck and arms, and since he can regrow his arms,[18] they’re not exactly conclusive evidence that he’s never been scarred there. Also, he does say talk about his situation—the scars he bears—as something other children in the country have to bear, suggesting that the norm is rather worse than a little symbolic gash across the palm or something! 17: In fairness, he may not own very much different, as I’ll discuss shortly. 18: The duplicated ones, at least. I seem to recall reading once that he could regrow the base set as well, but I’m still working on tracking down a citation on that.

Secondly, as was the case with the image of the historical massacres, the adults here are using tools/weapons in the assault, not quirks. As I mentioned in a footnote last time, them not using quirks to carry out this attack makes them merely criminals, not Villains, and therefore not nominally a Hero’s job to deal with. While I can’t imagine any Hero in the manga these days would stand back and let this go on, the absence still stands out—no Hero is participating in this, nor observing from the sidelines, nor trying to intervene. Heroes simply don’t figure into this picture at all.

Thirdly, we can see a few children in the background, both there with adults, I assume their parents. The child on the right is a passive observer, clinging close to their mother and simply watching; their father has one hand supportively on their shoulder. Neither parent seems distressed, insomuch as we can tell from their somewhat indistinct features and rather clearer body language. The child on the left is being actively held back by their mother, who’s standing with her back to the violence, her body interposed between it and her child. The kid is reaching out towards the scene, but it’s unclear what the intent is. Are they trying to intervene or do they want to join in? Neither child appears to be the little girl Shouji saved—the one on the right is dark-haired, and the one on the left—the more likely prospect just going by the body language!—is wearing a long, dark T-shirt instead of the little girl’s overalls. I suppose the left one could be the little girl if we assume she was hustled out of what she’d been wearing by her parents, eager to get her out of now-tainted (and also soaking wet) clothes and into something dry and warm and, in more ways than one, clean. However, that seems like the sort of thing that would take longer than what looks to have been a pretty impromptu, disorganized bloodletting, unless everyone just held off on assaulting Shouji right out on the street until the “victim” could be present.

Finally, there’s the pair of adults right at the center of the background. If anyone in this picture is actually related to Shouji, I’d put money on them being here, watching but not attempting to intercede. I don’t think it’s conclusive, though; the woman is thin and hunched, making her look older—I’d guess Shouji’s grandmother before Shouji’s mother. That hunched posture and her hands being raised to her mouth do give her the most obviously distressed appearance of any of the adult, though, to the extent that the person with her is focused on supporting her rather than watching what’s going on in the foreground—and forward attention is what I’d expect if the dark-haired figure is related to Shouji.

So that’s the image we have of the crowd—actively taking part or observing with varying degrees of reaction running from distress to indifference to, potentially, enthusiasm.

O Next, let’s talk about Shouji’s parents. He implies they were baseline—at the least they were significantly more baseline than Shouji himself, as they lacked arms “like his.” That makes it quite telling that Shouji’s parents are nowhere to be seen in his story beyond the simple mention of how they were different than him.

Now, I don’t want to suggest here that Shouji’s parents are completely irredeemable people. While I would imagine that—at least initially—they shared their town’s bigotry, having a heteromorphic child themselves would have exponentially increased the hardship of their own lives. In a town like that, I’m sure that many if not all of their neighbors must have come to regard them with suspicion of wrongdoing or transgression—recall the first page of the last chapter, where Shouji is accused of tricking the town in his having brought dirty blood to it. Hie parents almost certainly lost friends and likely became ostracized themselves, and ostracization in a small Japanese town can be a horrifying thing to deal with.

And yet, even with all that being the case, they didn’t abandon Shouji or give him up; they didn’t commit family suicide with him.[19] Assuming he wasn’t removed from their custody after the incident, they’re presumably paying his school and living costs;[20] likewise, unless he just ran away from home or is carrying out an incredibly elaborate deception about what school he’s attending, they almost had to support his desire to attend a hero school to begin with. In his situation, parents who support his desire to be a Hero is a big fucking deal. After all, between the winning and the saving, heroes will de facto be touching people all the time! If Shouji’s parents still live in his hometown, how do you think those people will take it when someone first realizes the Shouji family sent their kegare-riddled monster off to be a Hero?

19: The history of honorable suicide in Japan casts a very long shadow, and when it’s combined with the meiwaku culture, you get an underreported epidemic of things like parents who can’t see their way out of a bad situation taking their lives and their children’s as well, so as not to leave messy loose ends that others will have to bear the burden of dealing with.

20: I won’t get into whether or not the U.A. students’ parents are paying for any given thing on the following list, but here are some potential costs to consider, assuming that Shouji, like Uraraka, was commuting from an apartment prior to the dorms being implemented: tuition, school uniforms, textbooks, school supplies, school meal plan, food not served at school (e.g. breakfast and dinner or meals when the school is on break), non-uniform attire, personal care and hygiene, housing and transportation costs, a measure of spending money for unanticipated expenses or culturally expected gift-giving, etc.

All that being said, it’s obviously not a glowingly loving relationship, either. Think back to Shouji’s absolutely barren room in Chapter 99 and consider it in the context of the information we get in this chapter. Is he really so ascetic by inclination, or is he just used to making do with as little as possible? After all, it goes without saying that if him coming into contact with someone called for blood purification, anything he himself was in regular contact with was also to be considered incredibly impure. That includes his clothes, personal belongings and living space; even setting aside his parents’ view on it, who in his hometown would even want to provide or sell things to the family that they think will go to the child with the dirty blood that’s defiling their land?

Shouji’s parents’ absence is also glaring in other ways. For example:

They’re either not in the beating scene image above at all or they’re that central background couple hanging back and just watching; whichever is the case, what they’re assuredly not doing while their son is being beaten so badly he will still have glaringly visible scars years later is “trying to stop the violence or take the blows themselves.”

Shouji says he has one single good memory about his body, but his parents are nowhere to be found in that memory. Ergo, his parents have not given him a single moment of positivity about his heteromorphic form.

Parents of U.A. students were evacuated to U.A.—not just the ones near it, but even ones like Uraraka’s parents, who live at least a two hour drive away, in a wholly different prefecture with a third prefecture in between them and U.A. Every student we see in the departure scene in Chapter 342 is shown with their parents except Shouji.

To sum all that up, Shouji’s family situation is not maximally bad, but it’s certainly proximally bad.

O Next, we get Shouji alleging ignorance on the part of heteromorphs raised in cities, that there are still parts of the country in the modern day where stories like his happen.[21] It’s a milder version of the same assertions made by #2 and the beaky heteromorph last chapter, in that Shouji doesn’t suggest heteromorphobia doesn’t exist at all in cities, simply that there are extremes of violence that can only be found in the country. It still feels off, however, to suggest that absolutely no one else in Shouji’s class might ever have heard of this through any channel at all: being from similarly small towns, reading about an attack in the news, reading about factors that impact the public approval ratings for Heroes, going through a morbid phase in middle school and researching it, being talked to about it by their parents, etc.

21: The suggestion of the Viz translation of this suggests that city-raised heteromorphs do know this, but only because they’re read about it in textbooks. My sister-in-law, who does professional translation, tells me this was a subtle mistranslation of the original text, however; the textbook framing is supposed to imply a remove of time, not merely of distance.

It’s not as unrealistic a story beat here as it would be in an American comic, as Japan does tend more towards using silence as a weapon against bigotry—children won’t learn what they aren’t taught, and similar reasoning. Still, to portray the class as so unanimously ignorant reflects a deep incuriosity, be that in the kids themselves about the world around them or in their author about how the knowledge/perpetuation of discrimination spreads.

This is particularly the case when you consider the story’s handling of the Ordinary Woman—attacked in her own town because people were suspicious of a heteromorph out after dark, turned away from multiple shelters because of her heteromorph status. It’s certainly true that things got worse for heteromorphs after the first war arc, but for discrimination in that specific form to emerge, there needed to be something for it to draw on. The fear of villains and the association of villains with heteromorphs are the foundation for the upswelling in anti-heteromorph sentiments in cities.

O Mina’s reaction to all this is one of rather theatrical anger. That is, no one around her takes her broad declarations—that the world would be better off without the people who hurt Shouji—as anything more serious than hyperbole. This is, it would seem, the only sort of anger that’s acceptable to show in response to hearing a story like Shouji’s—empathy to the wronged, sure, but no real intent to confront the wrongdoers.

O Mineta stares into space for a second before emphatically apologizing for calling Shouji an octopus once—a call all the way back to his microaggression in Chapter 6!—and asserting that it wasn’t his intention to say Shouji was gross or anything. Shouji responds gracefully, saying it’s “only natural” that his arms would make people think of octopus.

He doesn’t go on to say, “But that doesn’t mean people have to say it out loud,” but it’s possible that Mineta’s apology is meant to suggest that regardless. At least, one certainly hopes this isn’t the author’s way of quietly absolving his more popular characters of all the times they’ve done the same thing! It’s notable, however, that none of the other Class 1-A kids that have done this are in the scene. Shouto and Bakugou, who have both used that kind of language in anger (and in the latter’s case, also just with no provocation whatsoever) are the missing elephants in the room, and even Sero, who was the actual person to call Shouji an octopus, is, in his absence, Sir Letting The Gag Character Handle This Apology So I A More Serious Character Don’t Have To.

O Shouji brings up the Heroes Who Look Like Villains rankings. We know the Number 1 on that list is actually Endeavor, per a movie bonus booklet, but bringing it up in this context does implicitly confirm that said rankings have an unseemly slant towards heteromorphs, and what did Skeptic say about Villains and heteromorphs again…?

O Shouji says he wears the mask because he knows that if people see his scars, they’ll wonder about them, and fear he’s out for revenge. He doesn’t want people to think that, so he covers them up. He’s praised for this by Tokoyami, and the narrative pretty clearly also thinks it’s admirable and cool. I have serious issues with this—chiefly that it’s prioritizing the oblivious comfort of the baseline citizens over the fellow feeling and affirmation of other persecuted heteromorphs—but I’m also curious to see if the mask will come back now that its meta-narrative purpose of hiding Shouji’s scars from the reader has been fulfilled. I note, for example, that Shouji is not wearing the mask in the color spread for Chapter 394, and the color art does have some precedent for being an early predictor of stuff in the body of the manga.[22]

Incidentally, while I’m talking about Shouji’s mask, I do wonder how effective it would even be for him to cover his scars up? I have my doubts for two reasons. First and most obviously, heroes are such celebrities, all over the news all the time, such that if Shouji really does get as popular as he intends to, there will be people who want to know what he looks like.[23]

22: The big one is Aizawa’s eyepatch. It showed up in two pieces of color art (the popularity poll results spread for Chapter 293 and the new art announcing the BNHA Drawing Smash Exhibition) before it was revealed in the manga. Both pieces released within days of each other in early December, 2020, three months after Shigaraki raked his hand down Aizawa’s face during the war and almost two months before the latter showed up in bandages in the hospital, with another two months to go beyond that before the eyepatch itself made it to the manga in late March. In a more stealth spoiler, the same popularity spread revealed Shigaraki’s blackened, burned face-hand two chapters prior to Spinner digging it out of Shigaraki’s pants. The 394 spread is also my basis for asserting that Mina’s horns have gone back to normal after her attack against Gigantomachia, compared to Shouji lacking his mask and Koda having his new horn in the same spread.

23: Edgeshot’s character profile page notes that his fans are split into two factions: those who’re mad to see his real face and those who think the mask is what makes him cool.

O More importantly, though, heroes have to be licensed, and Hero Licenses are photo IDs. Photo IDs don’t typically allow face coverage because not being able to provide a visual reference to what the bearer looks like defeats the whole purpose. While we don’t know what full-fledged hero licenses look like to say if they’re taken in or out of costume, we do know the provisional licenses the students carry showed them in their school uniforms, despite the fact that they definitely had working costumes by then:

Pardon the sudden screenshot. The manga has this shot, too, but the anime fills in the details of the text a bit more.

It seems probable to me that the photo on a Hero License must show the bearer’s face, so that if they’re tooling around a crime scene and a cop who hasn’t seen them around before asks for their license, it can reliably be used as a form of identification. (I wonder how Hagakure manages?)

Also, think back to the press conferences we’ve seen in the story, most recently the one post-war: at every one, the heroes are in serious, solemn black suits, not their costumes. So at any press conferences Shouji ever has to speak at in the future, he’ll have to show his face there, as well.

O We see a direct flashback to Shouji saving a little girl from drowning in a choppy, swift-flowing river as he says in voiceover that he’d rather cling to the single good memory related to his body than dwell on the bad memories. He very much uses his quirk to do it, with his right set of limbs used to hold onto the bank while his left ones reach out to the girl, extending out another few “nodes” of arm-length when he at first can’t keep hold of her fingers. As they sit and catch their breath afterward, the girl clings to one of his tentacles and cries. This is not quite what his entry in the Ultra Analysis databook was hinting at[24] when it said he wears the mask due to his scary face making a little girl cry; that’ll be next chapter.

24: My apologies for not bringing this up before; it’ll be covered on AO3. The gist is as detailed above; the databook came out circa the Endeavor Agency arc, so this was a known factoid about Shouji by the time this chapter came out three years later.

O Wrapping up the flashback, we’re left with Koda’s memory of Shouji saying that he knows it’ll take longer than a generation to tear down a wall that’s stood for over a century, so, just as previous generations have done, he’ll keep paying it forward, being the coolest hero the world’s ever seen, “to give good memories to generations to come.” Which sounds really nice when he says it that way, as opposed to the broader implication that people whose children have been or are in danger of being maimed by bigots should just keep their heads down and “keep paying it forward.”

The whole “be a cool hero and give good memories” bit is particularly egregious to my eye, for a few reasons.

How much good did cool heroes do for Takami Keigo when they were just on TV? Which is where Shouji will be, because in order to be “the coolest hero the world’s ever seen,” he’s going to have to be at the top of the rankings, and being at the top of the rankings means prioritizing cities, which means all those heteromorphs out in rural areas are never going to see him in person. And anyway, what’s stopping all those bigots from just changing the channel or going on a rant about Woke Mutie Agendas every time a heteromorphic hero crops up on TV?

How much did the visibility of previous generations’ cool heroes do for Spinner? Does Shouji think Spinner was super inspired and uplifted by seeing e.g. Gang Orca on TV using the emitter-like hypersonic waves his quirk gives him to beat up Villains, an undue percentage of whom are also heteromorphs?

It’s certainly nice that Shouji was inspired enough by heroes on TV to want to emulate them, but he is demonstrably not the norm when it comes to wildly disadvantaged and victimized heteromorphs. Also, I have to wonder how much his admiration of TV heroes would have done him if he’d gotten to the girl just a little later—say, in time to get her out of the river, but too late to be able to save her life without knowing CPR. As bad as it was for him when he saved a little girl but had to touch her to do it, can you imagine how much worse it would have been if he’d touched her and then failed to save her, being found or having to walk back into town with her body?

I realize that's incredibly dark, but it's the kind of question that presents itself when the story is so insistent on Shouji's exemplary behavior being the model for heteromorphs to follow in their own lives.

O Exiting the flashback, when Shouji calls out to the heteromorphs, we finally get a straight-out look at how disastrous this conclusion is going to be in the way he shouts that no, the people who hurt them weren’t justified, but that there has to be a better way, that they should think about how to use their rage—but offers exactly zero suggestions himself for what that better way might be, or what they should be using their rage to do instead.[25]

25: I have seen the argument put forth that Shouji is one (1) teenager, and one (1) teenager cannot fairly be asked to Solve Bigotry. To this, I would counter that if Shouji doesn’t have even one (1) single idea to offer, why is the camera lens holding him up as the hero who quelled a fifteen-thousand-strong mob with only words? He doesn’t have to Solve Bigotry, but if he’s going to be used as a counter for other peoples’ misguided but at least active attempts to address the problem, he needed to be better than a mere white knight for the status quo.

Spinner’s #2 calls Shouji out on this directly, saying that if the situation were that easy to resolve, it wouldn’t have come down to this, and accusing Shouji of having no feasible solution to offer, just childish and naïve egotism. And call me a hopeless MLA Stan and you’d be right, but truly, where’s the lie?

His efforts in this regard, however, wind up pushing Koda to what certainly has all the markings of a quirk awakening because it upsets Koda to see Shouji being “mocked.” Man, sure is a good thing quirk awakenings are just a dime a dozen and definitely don’t require life-threatening injuries and/or incredibly severe emotional distress over someone who means more to you than your own life, right?

O In a last little stroke of ugliness for the chapter, Spinner calls Shouji gross. Just to, you know, make it really obvious that the villains are all totally bad faith representation for this cause and thus can be safely dismissed. (Christ, I hate these chapters.)

Chapter 372:

O We get the flashback of Shouji and Koda asking All Might to assign them to the hospital defense group. Points of note:

Neither Shouji nor All Might can be bothered to use the Ordinary Woman’s real name, instead just referring to her by her size. Seriously, I get the intent behind insisting that she’s just an ordinary woman, that there’s nothing in particular stand-out about her in the current age; it’s pretty much the same deal as Shinomori saying that OFA can no longer be wielded by an “ordinary” person, with that phrasing being used to ironically emphasize that quirks are now seen as ordinary, while those without quirks are the unusual ones. However, it obviously wouldn’t work in-universe for characters trying to specify who they’re talking about to say, “That ordinary woman,” with the end result being that they have to grab for what stands out about her if they want to be understood—in this case, her obviously unusual height. In trying to emphasize that she’s normal, Horikoshi forces his characters to define her by what makes her stand out.

Koda says that if Shouji’s going, he is too, a moment that would really land much better if they’d had literally any interactions of note at literally any point prior to this exact moment. Frankly, even last chapter’s flashback is pretty thin on that front, since Koda is not one of the students who gets speaking lines when cuddling up to Shouji to comfort him. (I’m not even convinced it’s very in character for Koda to be one of the kids diving in for cuddles—he’s usually pretty shy!)

Shouji says that he could never call himself a hero if he were to stand back while the hospital attack plays out, implicitly emphasizing the role his reaction to his own oppression plays in his heroic motivation.

O Another flashback[26] gives us Koda’s mother discussing the possibility that he might get horns like hers someday, and what those horns can do, as well as mentioning that she used to have to put up with considerable mistreatment herself, and, lastly, telling her son to grow up into a man who gets angry when people mock those dear to him.

26: The sheer number of them crammed into this mini-arc really says a lot for how rushed it is, but complaining about the structural problems of the last few arcs would be a different essay.

Breaking those down, we’ve got:

The fact that Koda’s mom says he might grow in horns like hers suggests to me pretty strongly that her own horns are a quirk evolution she just doesn’t have the language to name as such. If it were just a matter of maturation, something that came in with puberty, there’d be no “maybe” about it. Given what we know about the context of quirk evolutions elsewhere, this in turn suggests that she did not exactly get her horns under peaceful, wholesome, uplifting circumstances!

This is backed up by her mention of the “real cruelty” she faced. Interestingly, this kind of raises some questions in relation to Shouji’s assertion last chapter that people like Koda who grew up in cities lack an understanding of the extremes of heteromorphobic violence that endure elsewhere. Did Koda’s parents move to the city from the country at some point when Koda was young/before he was born, and the “real cruelty” was out in the country? That might track with the overalls she was wearing. And of course, Koda’s mother was a younger woman then, so maybe it’s just the fact that heteromorphic discrimination was worse at the time. Either way, Koda’s mother is clearly open with him about the fact that she was mistreated because of her appearance, though she may have downplayed the severity of it.

The idea of Shouji being “dear to Koda” is immensely frustrating for how utterly groundless it is, based on absolutely no prior grounding within the story other than the general bond among the 1-A students. That’s just me complaining, though—more pertinent for this essay is the problem with how this moment frames anger. Like, the whole mini-arc has the same problem, but this chapter is particularly rotten with it. To preview: Koda’s anger is portrayed as righteous, as was his father’s, because their anger is about protection, about defensive reaction, about intervening with harm currently in progress—basically all the stuff Heroes are supposed to do. It is notably not about action based on past harm or proactive attempts to prevent future harm.

O Koda’s bird attack knocks Spinner’s #2 off the roof in one of the most egregious examples of, “I can’t come up with an actual counterpoint for his arguments, so I’ll just shut him up through force,” I’ve ever seen. Sure, there’s something to be said for not engaging bad faith parties in good faith arguments, but like… That guy already had a platform of his arguments—he was standing on the roof of a tall building! The author gave him several pages to make his pitch; the argument’s already out there in the readers’ minds! The only thing getting rid of him does is guarantee that the person the taciturn Shouji actually has to argue with is…Spinner. Who is not exactly a born orator at the best of times, and he’s very far from even that level here.

Now, #2 will get a few more lines next chapter, but they’re against one of the people on his own side. No heroic character has to argue #2 down; instead, they get to match wits with the literally drooling Spin-zilla. Which is a bit like stepping into the wrestling ring with someone who’s had a bag thrown over his head and his hands zip-tied behind his back.

This confrontation is, woefully, not the only place in the endgame where a heroic character gets all the time and freedom in the world to make their big pronunciations while their opponent gets shut down by some outside factor—interference from other villains, psychological decay, literal possession—but it’s in particularly stark relief here.

O Shouji contends that the crowd is letting their pain be exploited, which is a fair cop, but will become difficult to square with his praise of them next chapter.

O He says that these peoples’ children might be the next targets, presumably because of their actions here today. This is particularly maddening because it’s coming from someone who was, himself, already targeted as a child! Not because of anything his parents did, and certainly not because of anything bad he did, but simply because of the bigoted, backwards views of his town. Children already and still are being targeted! Shouji’s backstory is all wrong for this stand, and there’ll be another angle on that next chapter as well.

O Here we finally fulfill the promise of Shouji’s databook entry and see the Little Girl Crying Because His Face Was Scary. She wasn’t crying because she was just scared of his face in isolation, but rather because she sees his face being scary as her fault, directly correlating his wounds to her rescue.[27] Those wounds stand in marked contrast to what happens when other people save small helpless children from danger, and underlines the biggest problem with this whole resolution: the idea that simply Being An Hero will create change.

27: My big question is, “Given that him being in contact with her was so bad it got him scarred for life, how did she even sneak out to see him again to give him this tearful apology? Did young Shouji even want this apology, or would he have preferred she not risk the two of them being seen together again for both their sakes?

Now, it’s certainly likely in Horikoshi’s world that this little girl will, herself, grow up to be different from the people around her, that she won’t think heteromorphs are tainted. And like, that’s at least one less person being awful, right? And doesn’t every one count?

Sure, of course—but what happens when she runs up against that prejudice herself? Will she try to intervene the next time she sees a blood cleansing? Will she simply abstain from such action and teach equality in her own household without trying to change the village around her? Will she simply move away and leave her hometown worse for her absence? If she does stay in that town, will she herself become an outcast for her views—a form of silent, passive harassment that can be absolutely life-wrecking in those small Japanese villages? If she gets married and has children, will her husband have her back in trying to raise those kids free of hatred?

For that matter, isn’t there a chance that, being surrounded in people who think heteromorphs are tainted, that she’ll just internalize something like, “It was my carelessness that got that poor heteromorph boy beaten so badly. He was trying to help, and it only got us both hurt—him for the beatings, me for being in contact with his filth.” Like, she’s so young in that scene; she’s got a whole lotta years of having the anti-heteromorph narrative reaffirmed at her before she’s old enough to do anything different herself. It feels to me like the kind of thing that she could easily fall back into as she grows up, only to have a huge spiritual crisis about it once she hits her late teens to early twenties.

In any case, it's just a lot to put on a single child—on her and Shouji both!

O Spinner rallies enough to yell out a message of his own, but it’s just a quote of what he told his followers when he first sent out the call, not anything new to rally them, nor tailored to respond to what Shouji’s saying. This has been the danger of the plotline all along, and here it comes to fruition: in putting bad faith villains with ulterior motives[28] up against an underdeveloped character who’s hidden the evidence of his mistreatment from Day 1, someone with no apparent intention to ever speak up for others like himself, no one comes out looking good. Truly, heteromorphs deserve better rep.

28: #2 is the obvious one, but Spinner’s here in bad faith, too. While I’m sure he’s not totally indifferent to the matter of heteromorph rights, it’s self-admittedly not his current priority.

O That said, if what Spinner says is old hat to the crowd, it is new to the audience, and it serves to sharply up the ante on from what we knew previously about the persecution he faced in his hometown!

But it would have gotten better if he’d just put on a mask and dealt with it, amirite?

Recall that Spinner has previously only said that people in his town called him names—this is self-evidently many steps worse. Note, though, that it’s another example of the violence heteromorphs face not involving anyone using quirks—that is to say, nothing that’s a hero’s jurisdiction to deal with. That being the case, how much could Spinner get away with fighting back or running before the “it’s okay to use quirks in self-defense” stops holding? After all, is it still self-defense if biased cops[29] can accuse him of “escalating” the conflict? How far away can he get by climbing on walls before it becomes, to some small-town local Hero, unlicensed public quirk use?

29: If policing in HeroAca Japan still works basically the same as it does in IRL Japan, then in truly backwater areas, ones too small to afford the upkeep of a police department, an officer would be sent in from another area to live in a home attached to the police box. That being the case, it’s not a given that the officer would share the locals’ bigotry. That’s where we come back to the whole “what percentage of Villain-designated criminals are heteromorphs” statement and what it implies about bias in the law enforcement system. Also too, building a strong relationship with the community is absolutely essential to rural policing, and there are, oh, so many stories about what happens when someone new in a small Japanese town gets between the inhabitants and their “traditional spiritual practices.”

O Pig Nose Guy starts making an impression by noticing the doctors—most prominently Dr. Yoshi, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a baseline nurse—forming a human chain in front of the hallway leading to the Inpatient Ward. This drama is undercut on both fronts by the fact that Spinner is not looking for the Inpatient Ward, and in fact barrels right on past that hallway without even glancing in its direction. So, the mob stops because they’re struck to hesitation by a group of people protecting a part of the hospital that the mob was not even intending to assault in the first place.

O As part of stopping, Pig Nose Guy seems to have some sort of flashback to a time he saw Dr. Toad caring for an elderly baseline man. This raises a lot of questions to my by-this-time hyper-critical eyes.

What past circumstance brought Pig Nose Guy—presumably fairly rural, as most of this crowd is implied to be—to Central Hospital, the most technologically advanced hospital in the entire country? • If Pig Nose Guy is not rural, but was still so fired up about heteromorphobia that he joined a terrorist-led mob to attack a hospital, wouldn’t that suggest that a lot of people in the story have been misleading us about the extent of anti-heteromorph sentiment in cities?

If the person in the bed is someone related to Pig Nose Guy—perhaps someone with a rare illness that requires specialized treatment?—why is the guy entirely baseline? If it’s just a friend, then they must be very close, given that PNG was willing to take a trip to the Tokyo metropolitan area to visit him. But if PNG is that close to a baseline guy, why did he ever believe that baseline folks are such a lost cause that he, again, joined a terrorist-led mob to attack a hospital?

Why is this important, impactful memory one of a heteromorph in a caretaker role instead of being taken care of? To elaborate on why that question matters, a common issue you’ll see minority groups raise when talking about representation in media is the role any given minority character performs in their narrative—the gay best friend there to give the straight female lead advice, the Black person there to help a white person self-actualize, that sort of thing. This is not so much a critique of any given, specific character as it is criticizing the restrictions on of what demographics are allowed to be portrayed as full, rounded individuals in popular media versus which are relegated to stock stereotypes or supporting cast. This isn’t something BNHA addresses explicitly, but I do think we have some precedent for suspecting heteromorphs in this world have similar problems—think of the image for Class B’s play in Chapter 173, Gang Orca playing the Villain at the license exam, and, most egregiously, the Hug Me Corporation and its all-baseline-all-the-time image of bystanders and victims. That being the case, it really gets to me that Pig Nose Guy’s memory here has the man in the hospital bed being baseline while it’s the doctor who’s the heteromorph. Like, what does that communicate about his mindset, exactly? “Oh, I remember this time I saw a heteromorph who’d managed to actually kind of Make It in society and he was nice to the baseline guy in his care. But the spider guy leading us, he didn’t sound like he wanted us to be very nice at all. Is that what I am? Not nice?” On the other hand, if the whole point of this memory is to remind PNG that there can be peace and support between heteromorphs and “people with human faces,” why in heaven’s name isn’t this a memory of a heteromorph being cared for and supported by a baseline person? Why does the person doing the labor in this picture have to be of the oppressed class?

I hate this panel so much.

Chapter 373:

O The last conversation plays out between Pig Nose Guy, #2, and Shouji, revealing #2 to be a bad faith idealogue who thinks of Shouji with microaggressions and his followers as meatshield patsies. It’s real bad.

O Shouji says that the feelings that led the mob to come today are neither useless nor wrong, and that their willingness to keep thinking about everything makes them look like a bright and shining light to his eyes. However, he carefully does not engage with the fact that those feelings, which were previously aimless and directionless, were only stirred up and stoked to the point of “coming today” by the villains. It’s the same sort of thing the villains always get told, really—you may have a point, you have suffered, but when you act on that point, that suffering, then you’ve gone too far. All you’re really supposed to do with that pain is—what, exactly? Thinka bout it and choose to Nobly Endure?

O The last little bit of insult to this chapter, to my eye, is #2 getting an apology from some anonymous hero we’ve never seen in our lives, who says, “We’ve heard your voices loud and clear today. Sorry for not realizing sooner.”

Remember the bit where the person who apologizes to Shouji for the octopus comment is Mineta, the gag character, instead of Sero, the serious character who brought it up in the first place? Remember the conspicuous absence of Bakugou and Todoroki, who have actually used that language with conscious demeaning intent? This apology is the systemic version of that absolute unwillingness on Horikoshi’s part to let his sympathetic/popular/important characters look bad. It’s the same thing that led to none of the heroes who retired after the war being heroes the readers know and care about, the same thing behind the total collapse of the series’ critique of All Might. Heroes are allowed to be ignorant, but they are not allowed to be complicit.

Notice, too, what this random hero does not say, what Shouji does not offer, the absence that damns this resolution: any promises of concrete change. We’ve finally gotten to the crux of Horikoshi’s point, as delivered by Shouji, and it really does all boil down to this:

And I can’t overstate enough what a terrible resolution this is, especially given how Shouji’s own experience puts the lie to it. Remember, Shouji saved a child from drowning, one of the absolute most prototypical actions someone can do and get called a Hero by the bystanders/victims/evening news. The only thing he could have done that would have been more stereotyped would have been saving her from a burning building! He saved that little girl from drowning and the townsfolk attacked him with farming tools for it.

How much more heroic would he have needed to be? How much more of a shining light could he possibly have been? In what universe could someone with that backstory possibly think that the answer to systemic bigotry—violence that goes wholly accepted by the community and wholly unpunished by the broader society—could be this Model Minority bullshit?

Ultimately, for Shouji’s backstory to realistically have given him the motivation he professes, his actions needed to have changed the people in his village for the better. If the reader is meant to believe that Shouji’s “answer”—the premise that selfless heroism can change the hearts of bigots—then we have to see it. And, you know, even if that had been what we got, there would still be grounds to criticize it! It would still be a perhaps-too-idealistic depiction of fighting oppression; it would still put too much responsibility on the victims! But at least it would justify Shouji’s own stance.

As it is, we have Shouji choosing to believe in the changeability of people who specifically shouted while throwing rocks at him that, no matter how much the times advanced, they would never accept him. His answer does not entail a single non-heteromorph working to bring heteromorphs living in the darkness a light; it entails them kindling their own. As with Pig Nose Guy shutting down in the face of a memory of a heteromorph doctor, this resolution asserts the life-changing power of…being told that heteromorphs have to do all the work to make baseline people feel better.

Conclusion

Do I think that this terrible resolution means heteromorphobia was poorly set up or retconned? No, I don’t. I just think it means that Horikoshi is a Japanese man writing a Japanese story from a position of demographic privilege in Japanese society. I think he’s fully capable of setting up a detailed, intelligent, thoughtful discrimination allegory, a logical, internally consistent extension of the discrimination in the world around him to the alternate future he’s created—and then coming to a completely different resolution than I would because his context led him to different answers than I wanted or found acceptable. Compared to the U.S., Japan as a culture is more communal, more collectivist; they have less history with successful protest movements, more history with protest movements turning violently extremist or just being ignored by those in power. The idea of “not making trouble for others” is an incredibly deeply engrained value.

I have a decent idea why this resolution is what it is. I can try to make myself view it through the more generous, forgiving lens of Cultural Differences; I can fail to do so and instead conclude that this is portrayal is much less about Cultural Differences than it is yet another in a long chain of Well-Meaning Majority-Culture Author Writes Discrimination Allegory, Fucks It All Up Because of His Well-Meaning Majority-Culture Centrism. That doesn’t mean I believe heteromorphobia came out of nowhere, and I hope this essay has at least demonstrated that much, whatever you might think of its resolution.

——————————

Thank you so much for taking this journey with me, all! At 42,000 words and 93 pages in Word, there's definitely more I'd like to do with this, chiefly taking a spin through the Vigilantes spinoff, which I've always found to be very good at grappling with practical questions and concerns BNHA Core largely ignores. The character of Kamayan is particularly relevant to this topic.

However, for now, I'm going to take a break on this subject and turn my attention to something else. I'm not sure what it'll be quite yet, but meta projects that have moved towards the top of my list concern the ridiculous series of nerfs Toga has been subjected to in this endgame, arc thoughts on everything I hate about the stupid, stupid All Mech fight, and an organized argument for the endgame being chock-full of retcons that are obvious if you look at them for more than the five minutes it takes to read a chapter each week.

You may notice that all of those are pretty negative-sounding, and you would be right. Given that the whole reason I stopped doing my chapter posts is that I was weary of the constant negativity, the actual next thing I do will probably be to get back to one of my neglected MLA fanfic projects.

'Til next time, all!

#bnha #bnha meta #bnha worldbuilding #heteromorph discrimination plot #octolad #plf advisors #my writing #preview for Vigilantes:#Kamayan is a crank and that distracts everyone #from realizing that Kamayan is also right

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lunasfics · 7 months

Text

Found Family

summary: In which Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent engage in a custody battle over a clone created from both their DNA, or, in which you get saved from a lab and gain two new families who would move mountains for you.

pairing: Bat Family x f! Reader, Supers x f! Reader

word count: 8.2k

preview

a/n: hello! IT'S FINALLY OUT WOOHOO, it's a bit long but i had a lot of fun writing it. certain characters may be a bit ooc so i do apologize as i'm still getting my footing on how to characterize certain people. let me know what you think! constructive criticism is always welcome and appreciated (just pls don't be mean lol)! i left a somewhat open-ish ending because i wanna make this into a series/universe, and will start taking requests for drabbles in this universe, depending on how this is received! - luna :)

reblogs are appreciated!

“I’m in. Robin, what’s your status?” Bruce spoke into the earpiece, swiftly moving through the shadows of the lab. It was a simple mission: get into the lab Lex Luthor had created under Gotham City, collect intel needed to take down said lab, and leave. Unfortunately, it’s never really that simple, is it?

“I’m in, making my way through the west wing, cover is still intact,” Damian muttered back.

“Good. Nightwing?”

“Just entered the center lab, heading down to the bottom level now, haven't been spotted,” Dick said, making his way down the steps, careful to remain silent.

“Good. Remember the objective. In and Out.” Bruce muttered as he continued, searching for the locked file cabinet he was looking for.

“Files located. Ready for extraction” Damian said quietly through the intercom.

“I’ve made it to the bottom level. Requesting immediate backup, there's something here you guys need to see” Dick’s voice echoed through the earpiece, “They’ve made another clone.”

Bruce stopped what he was doing, silently making his way down the hall towards the staircase Dick took around a half hour before, “I'm on my way. Damian?”

“Heading there now. Files are downloaded.”

Upon arriving at the lower level, Dick bypasses security to let them in, making sure to reactivate the lock behind them, “Look.”

He gestured to the incubation tube not far from them, inside of it stood a young woman, who looked no older than 20, wearing a black skin-tight suit, a familiar “S” symbol adorning her chest, only it was the center of another symbol, the bat symbol, with bat ears at the top and bat wings on either side of it, a dark burgundy color with gold lining along the edges. The plaque below the tube read:

Attempt 1: G6B24

Specimen 1: Superman (Identity: Unknown)

Specimen 2: Batman (Identity: Unknown)

Status: Failed - Shows excessive signs of emotional intelligence (unfit for purpose), Subject is not invulnerable, Lacks thermal vision

‘Emotional Intelligence’ you must have shown hesitation, a moral compass.

“Father… what are we going to do?” Damian asked, he was at a loss, part of him felt slightly threatened, if you were taken in, he would no longer be the only child related to Bruce by DNA, and you were older, stronger— perhaps you would take his place, the place he’d finally felt he truly belonged; however he remained silent, his past self likely would have attempted to argue against your rescue, but he’d grown, he knew deep down you deserved a chance at this life just as much as he did.

Bruce looked up at your unconscious figure, at a loss for words, you were his daughter, intentional or not, there was a part of him in you, he only hoped that part wouldn't screw you over for life. As surprised as he was, he had an obligation to you the same way he did with Dick, Jason, Tim, Cass, Steph, Barbara, Duke, Damian, and every other vigilante he had taken under his wing.

His Batman instincts kicked in very quickly though, immediately refocusing himself, reading through the files, in an attempt to prepare himself for any possible scenario, he turned to Dick.

“Find all the DNA samples they have belonging to both me and Superman, we’re taking them,” he said, making sure to not hyper-focus on the thoughts flooding his mind.

“We’re not just leaving her here, are we? The plaque says ‘failed’. Who knows what could happen to her?” Dick said, he was frustrated.

Conner had gotten a chance to build a life for himself. You deserved one too, the mere thought of Bruce wanting to leave you there angered him.

“She’s coming with us. Damian, watch the door, Dick, find the samples," Bruce said gruffly, moving to the tube, bypassing the database to open it, without setting off any system safeguards. He reached into his utility belt and pulled out his shard of kryptonite, just in case it was needed to neutralize you.

The tube opened slowly, a swoosh sound filling the air as the cold fog escaped the tube, spilling into the air, your eyes fluttering open as you looked around, your eyes focusing on him.

You flew at him, full speed, pushing him against the wall with a thud, knocking the wind out of him, your eyes boring into his, glowing red, just as you were about to terminate him with your heat vision, he uttered the safe word he had seen in your file.

“Blue Pineapple” he grunted out, the red in your eyes fading away instantly, as you stared at him with wide eyes. You backed away slowly, lowering yourself to the floor. Your eyes fixed on him once again.

You recognized him from your programming, the man whose combat skills were engraved into your mind.

“Batman?”

Dick and Damian rushed over, making sure Bruce was okay. He was fine.

Dick turned to you, holding out his hand, “Come with me. We need to get you out of here, you aren’t safe here.”

You stared at him, your eyes narrowing, “Why should I trust you?”

Dick sighed, Those damn Wayne genetics, he kept his hand extended to you, “Because we’re helping you escape, if you come with us, you can meet Superman, be a hero just like him and Batman, you could actually see the world” he promised.

"I know what the world looks like." you stated bluntly.

He sighed, his hand not wavering, "But have you ever experienced it? Let us show you what that's like. You can have a life."

You thought for a moment, before letting out a small grunt, nodding at him and taking his hand, allowing them to lead you out of the lab grounds seemingly undetected.

When you stepped out, you stopped, eyes completely transfixed on the brilliant night sky. Blends of blues and purples and grays danced together to make the beautiful endless abyss above you. You knew every color there was. You knew everything, but at the same time you really didn't. You stared up at the stars, you knew how they came to be, you knew every scientific explanation there was yet seeing them… it made you feel a way you couldn’t explain.

They led you to the batmobile, situating you in the back seat with Damian, starting the drive to the Batcave. Bruce dialed Clark’s number into the keypad, it rang twice before he picked up.

“Hello?”

“Meet me in the Batcave. It’s urgent. Bring Conner.”

“What’s going o-”

He hung up.

Dick covered his mouth to hide his snicker, “So, Bruce, you and Clark have an official love child now, right? What will Lois think?” he feigned concern, placing the back of his hand over his forehead, committing to the drama, “Oh, how scandalous, I mean really, the shame! I can already see the headlines ‘Billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne turned common whore after breaking up happy metropolis family’”

Damian covered his laugh with a cough.

You looked at the three of them, utterly confused, still processing what was going on.

Bruce huffed, shooting them both a glare, “Dick, be mature.”

Dick smiled, “I can't help myself, just wait til Jason finds out.” He smiled in excitement, as they pulled into the side entrance of the Batcave.

Bruce let out a deep, tired sigh.

Clark sat in silence in the Batcave, Conner standing to his left, his eyes wide as he stared at you, possessing some features belonging to both he and Bruce, and other features that seemed to be entirely your own.

You stared back, that same stoic nature radiating off of you that radiates off the Batman, however, he noted the defensive look in your eyes, one so similar to the one he saw in Conner when he first met him. He eyed your suit, noting the familiar “S” symbol, only it was a burgundy color, a rather interesting combination of the Batman and Superman emblems, and he was utterly confused.

He looked over at Bruce, still in his bat suit, his cowl pulled off, “Bruce, what the hell is going on?”

“I had to call you here because Luthor decided to create another clone. I did the DNA test, Clark, she’s a combination of both our DNA” Bruce looked at him, Dick and Damian standing to his right. It was silent for a moment, you felt like a guinea pig, the way they all stared at you. It made you angry.

Conner was the first to speak, stepping forward before opening his mouth, choosing his words carefully, “What’s your name?”

You responded immediately, it felt automatic. “Experiment attempt number one. Code G6B24. I was made to be the future killer of the Batman and the Kriptonian.”

He nodded slowly, “I’m a clone too, and Clark took me in— well, he took me in eventually— that’s besides the point. He showed me how to become my own person, we can help you do that too.”

You looked at him, eyes softening ever so slightly, but you kept your guard up like your Batman programming taught you to. “I was made to be a killer, if I don’t do what I was made to do, what am I worth?” you said quietly, voice unwavering.

Damian watched you, your words striking him in a way he hadn't expected them to, he understood what you were saying all too well.

Bruce decided to speak up next, “You were created, it’s not your fault what their intentions were when they did so. What you become from here on out is your choice.”

You stayed silent, eyes darting around the room—What is this feeling? Vulnerability? You knew it by definition, like you did most other feelings, but feeling them… it was different.

Dick noted the way you seemed overwhelmed, he approached you slowly, pulling up two chairs, motioning for you to sit, you chose to remain standing until he sat down first.

“You know, we trust you, we want to figure out a way for you to become the best you can be. On your terms” he said, offering you a small smile.

You looked around, the others nodded in agreement, “I was made to be only the best parts of you” you said, your gaze focusing on Clark and Bruce, they both put their best qualities forward to help others, how could you use those same qualities to destroy that?

“I… don’t want to be a killer. They said I was too… human. I thought I’d failed them.”

Damian decided to step forward, “You didn’t fail anyone, you are meant for greater things. You haven't killed anyone, you can choose your path. If the path you choose is the Robin mantle... I am willing to work with that.”

At this, the other men in the room turned to look at him, Clark and Conner were slack-jawed, this was the same kid who fought Tim tooth and nail over this mantle. The same mantle he was just… willing to give you?

Meanwhile Dick had a proud smile on his face, you thought you saw a small tear in his eye.

Bruce’s face seemed unreadable, however, you took notice of the way the corners of his lips turned up for a split second. before reverting back to their natural state.

You weren’t sure what to say, again, you knew what this mantle was, by definition. The reality was you had no sense of what it meant, the weight it carried. And you knew that.

“Thank you, but I feel like that title isn’t mine to take. I think I need to… become something that's true to who I am, whatever that may be.”

Bruce looked at you, the corner of his lip barely twitching up into a smile, a smile so subtle that only someone of your… background would notice, an attempt of his towards getting you more comfortable, “We should start with a name.”

You looked at Conner, he gave you an encouraging smile.

“Like I chose Conner, so now I’m Conner Kent,” he said with a small shrug, “You can choose whatever you want.”

“I see,” you thought for a moment, “I like Y/n.”

Clark smiled, standing up and clapping his hands together, “Great! Y/n Kent, has a nice ring to it.”

“Wayne.”

He turned towards Bruce, eyes narrowing slightly, “Kent.”

“Wayne.”

This time Conner spoke, “Kent.”

The three men stared at each other, arms crossed mirroring each-other’s glares.

Dick cut in, “How about Grayson?”

“No.” came their simultaneous response.

Dick frowned, slumping in the seat next to yours, “Jeez.”

Damian spoke next, “I suppose Al Ghul is off the table…”

Dick snorted, breaking out into a fit of laughter, you grinned softly at the sounds of his laughter, it reminded you of a windshield wiper.

Conner sighed, “Fine, what about Wayne-Kent?”

Bruce huffed, “I suppose.”

Clark nodded, the smile returning to his face as he turned to you, “Y/n Wayne-Kent”

You nodded, “I like it.”

Dick could help but laugh from beside you, “It's like I'm watching reality tv. Love me some baby mama drama.”

Clark opened his mouth to speak and closed it, before sighing and looking at Bruce, who just pinched the bridge of his nose.

Conner chuckled at the sight, turning to Damian, who’s lip quirked up in amusement.

Bruce looked up, his attention directed towards you, “Y/n, you can stay here for the night, I’ve asked Alfred to set up a room for you. Clark, Conner, come by tomorrow with Lois and Jon, I’ve called the others to come by as well, we’ll get everything situated tomorrow. For now, get some rest.”

Everyone nodded, Clark and Conner heading to the exit of the cave, Damian, Dick and Bruce leading you to the room that was prepared for you.

Dick brought you a sweater and some sweatpants to change into, closing the door with a soft, “Goodnight, kiddo.”

You changed in silence, slowly getting under the covers and drifting off to sleep, marking the start of your new life. Tomorrow would be an interesting day.

You woke up the next morning, to a soft knock on the door, your super hearing picking it up better than you would have liked. You opened the door, revealing an older man you hadn’t seen before. He smiled softly, giving you an instantaneous sense of comfort you couldn’t explain.

“Hello Miss Y/n. My name is Alfred, I am the butler,” he greeted you, handing you a folded set of clothes, “Master Kent chose these for you, however if they are not to your liking, do let me know.”

“They’re fine…Thank you.”

He smiled warmly, the kind old man giving you a nod, “Once you've changed, do come down, I’ve prepared breakfast. The other members of the family will arrive soon to meet you.”

You gave him a short nod, he smiled again, your demeanor reminding him of the young Bruce he’d looked after all those years ago. He shut your door softly before retreating down the staircase, leaving you in your room to change.

You picked up the small note that rested at the top of the pile, reading it over.

Comfortable, Practical, and cool. Hope you like it. - Conner

You looked down at the neatly folded clothes, unfolding a black long sleeve turtleneck shirt, the material was thick but breathable, you slipped it on with ease, the foreign material soft against your skin, you appreciated that it didn’t suffocate you.

You reached for the pants next, dark gray cargo pants, these were thicker, and the had an overwhelming amount of pockets. You slipped them on before slipping on the boots that were at the bottom of the stack and exiting the room, going down the staircase.

Upon entering the dining room, you were met with Bruce sitting at the head of the table, reading the paper calmly eating his pancakes, to his right sat Dick chatting excitedly to the boy next to him, who smiled at him as he listened, he was a slender boy with black hair who looked a bit younger than Dick. Then there was Alred, calmly enjoying his breakfast. Finally there was Damian on the other side of Bruce, leaving an empty seat between Damian and Alred. You sat down, the pale boy noticing you first.

Bruce looked up, “Tim, this is Y/n.”

“Hello.” You sat up awkwardly. One thing you never learned was how to navigate social interactions.

He studied you for a moment, offering you a small smile, “I’m Tim.”

You gave a nod, returning his smile with a smaller one of your own.

“She knows, by the way.” Dick chimed in.

His eyes widened, was that why you were there?

“How?”

All eyes are on you. You opened your mouth to speak but Damian spoke first.

“She’s a clone. Father will explain everything when everyone else arrives so as to not waste time, until then, hold on to your childish curiosity. I’d like to enjoy my breakfast.”

Dick nodded, “She was literally made for this shit.”

“Watch your language Master Dick, it is deplorable to speak in such a way at the table, much less in the presence of a lady.”

Dick blushed, “Sorry Alfred.”

Bruce simply gave a nod.

Tim slumped back in his seat, wanting to ask you questions about your abilities, your earliest memories, who were you a clone of, how your programming worked, the boy was itching to know it all.

Breakfast passed by relatively quickly after that, you weren’t bombarded with questions, much to your relief. Alfred kindly asked you how you slept to which you replied that you slept well. The sound of casual conversation and glassware scraping together filling the room. You enjoyed observing the atmosphere.

Clark and Conner were the first to arrive at the manor, greeting you happily, with them was a woman and a younger boy, who immediately went to sit by Damian.

Clark brought them over to you, the woman smiled warmly at you. It made you feel safe.

She held your hand in hers, “My name is Lois,” her voice was kind, genuine. You noted how she carried herself. Strong, secure, honest.

Clark was quick to bring Jon over, excited to introduce him, “This is my son, Jon.”

“Hi!” he beamed at you, you smiled, he was cute. Cheerful as he smiled brightly at you.

“Hello, my name is Y/n.” you greeted the two, who smiled at you.

Conner was the next to approach, “Did you like the clothes? I picked them out cause it was all I used to wear, but who knows, you may want something more… fashionable.”

You smiled softly, “They're nice, thank you.”

“On that note actually,” Clark said, “I was thinking we can take you shopping later, Bruce and I can pay.”

Bruce deadpanned, “That’s a joke, right?”

He smiled, “Of course, you’re paying for everything.”

“Sounds about right.”

Chatter filled the room not long after, Jon and Damian catching up on the couch while Conner and Tim started a conversation of their own.

The next people to arrive were three young women, blonde, brunette, and red hair. They had arrived together.

The blonde spoke first, “Why'd you call us here Bruce? We had planned for brunch.” She bitterly narrowed her eyes at him, the brunette behind her giving a short nod of agreement.

Bruce sighed, “We’re waiting on Jason. He’s late.”

“As always.” The redhead said with a sigh, though you could see she wasn't actually upset.

The blonde girl turned to you first smiling, “I’m Stephanie, but call me Steph. I’m assuming you’ll be joining our vigilante posse.” She seemed funny, and kind, like she truly cared for those around her.

“Somewhat, I don’t really know. I’m Y/n.” You said bluntly.

“Pretty name.” She smiled, gesturing to the red haired woman behind her, “This is Barbara, but she's really just Babs.” She then gestured to the brunette, “That’s Cass. She’s lovely.”

You looked at them and nodded, “It’s nice to meet you.”

Barbara smiled warmly at you, “You too, I’m so glad there’ll be another girl around, we can always use more company.” She smiled at you so kindly, despite having only just met you. Her voice was sweet, like honey.

Cass smiled softly at you, “Come to brunch with us later. Or, lunch, now since Jason is holding us up.”

You nodded your lip quirking up into a small smile, “I’d enjoy that.”

Truthfully, you didn't know what the fuck brunch was. But she said lunch and that you knew. You'd find out about brunch later.

Then, as if on cue, the man in question arrived, walking through the door, slipping off his brown jacket and tossing it on the couch. He was tall, with a stocky frame, jet black hair with a white streak on the front.

“This better be good.”

Tim mumbled, “Finally”

“Miss me Timmy?”

“Quite the contrary.”

The one called Jason laughed before giving him a small nudge, to which Tim swatted his hand away.

His eyes fixed on you, then on Bruce.

“Dude, seriously? Another one? You have a problem man. You’d think you would’ve stopped after me.”

Bruce stood up, “Jason, sit down. Now that you’re all here I wanted to introduce you to Y/n. She’s a clone, made from both mine, and Clark’s DNA.”

“Holy shit, man.”

“Jason, will you shut up?”

“Never.”

“As I was saying, she’ll be here in the manor for the time being, I’ll be training her and assessing her combat technique.”

“Hold on,” Clark interjected, “She should come with us, she needs to get the hang of her powers.”

“Clark, I have a state of the art training area in the cave.”

“So? We’re supers, all we need is an open field.”

“We need to assess her combat skills, and also assess the extent of her powers. She isn’t invulnerable. We need to prioritize getting to the bottom of that.”

Clark huffed but nodded, understanding the full extent of your abilities was vital in actually training you.

“It’s like I’m watching a custody battle.” muttered Steph, Barbara laughing quietly beside her.

“Wait- So Y/n is basically if you and Clark had a baby?” Tim gawked at them, his eyes shifting from Bruce to Clark, to you. When his eyes landed on you, he fired questions like he was on a time limit.

“How do Bruce’s genetics affect your abilities? Are you immune to kryptonite and invulnerable? How does your thermal vision work? Enhanced strength? Can you fly? Can you fly as fast as Superman? Do you have combat training? How do y-”

Conner smacked a hand over his mouth, leading him back to his seat, “Lets try not to overwhelm her with the questions.” He chuckled.

Tim nodded, looking up at you, “Sorry, Y/n.”

“That’s okay. To answer your questions, his genetics don’t necessarily have a huge impact on any of my abilities, I was created with every available video of Batman fighting embedded into my mind, and the combat skills were engraved in my memory, I should be able to replicate his fighting style to a tee. I’m not invulnerable, but in theory, the stealth I was programmed with allows me to stay agile enough that I shouldn’t often get hurt. I don't have thermal vision, but I do have laser vision, enhanced strength, and flight, although I haven’t tested how fast I actually can fly. And like I said, my combat training is essentially the combat footage uploaded into my mind.”

Tim had nodded, eyes trained on yours in complete interest as you answered each question, occasionally jotting something down on the notes app of his phone.

Lois narrowed her eyes slightly at both Bruce and Clark, “I do hope you’re factoring in giving her the opportunity to build an actual social life. Maybe get her enrolled in school.”

“She has doctorate-level information on several different topics stored into her mind, as well as fluency in 8 languages. I think she’ll be fine, Lois,” Bruce replied.

She rolled her eyes, “Okay, so school’s not necessary, what about building a social life for herself? That’s important.”

“There’s Young Justice,” Conner said, “I figured she’d join.”

Tim nodded in agreement, “I can help her get situated.”

“Where will I stay?” you asked, you didn’t particularly enjoy how they were all discussing you as if you weren't there, but there honestly wasn’t much you could do.

“You can stay at the manor, or you can stay with the team, but it'd be best if you lived here in the Manor.” Bruce replied.

“Why isn’t Metropolis an option?” Clark muttered.

“Because it’s more practical to have her here in Gotham, living with Tim will make it easier to adjust to the team.”

“I want time with her, Bruce.”

“You’ll get it. We’ll have her assessed, then three times a week she’ll train and get a hold of her powers with you.”

Clark nodded, satisfied with that answer.

Lois spoke again, turning to you, “Y/n, how does that sound to you?”

You blinked. “It sounds fine. My super hearing allows me to hear every conversation proficiently.”

She chuckled softly, “It’s a figure of speech sweetheart, I meant if you’re okay with everything that was said, you’ve been a bit quiet.”

You felt your face grow hot, “Oh. Yeah, I’m okay with it.”

Clark gave you a fond smile.

Bruce looked at you and smiled softly, a barely noticeable one, but a smile nonetheless.

The bulk of the conversation was over. The people in the room falling into easy conversation with one another, you look around, not sure what to do. That is until Jason approaches you, a kind smile on his face.

“Hey Y/n, I’m Jason, I’ll be honest, you probably won't see me too often cause I can barely stand being around Bruce, but… if he’s ever a dick, call me and I’ll either punch him for you and take you somewhere he’s not.” he grinned, “Or both.”

You laughed softly, “I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you.”

He nodded, “I’ll be raiding the kitchen, but if anyone asks, I left.” He shoots you a grin before slipping away.

It’s not long after that when Jon approaches you, Damian by his side, he shoots you a toothy grin, “So, you’re like, my sister now, right?”

You’re not sure how to respond, but you feel a puddle of warmth pooling in your heart, it’s nice. You smile at him softly, “I suppose so.”

He grins, “And that would also make you Damian’s sister. right?”

“I suppose so.”

“See Damian, we’re blood brothers by extension.”

“Jon, that is the most imbecilic logic I’ve ever encountered. Just because Y/n is both my blood and yours doesn’t mean–”

“Blood brothers!” He had shouted cheerfully, before walking away and over to Lois to inform her of the good news.

Damian sighed, though you took notice of the soft smile that flashed across his face, you concluded that he cared for him.

A lot of people in this family– Bruce’s family specifically, tend to hide affection, despite the fact that it is apparent to you that they feel it. You decide not to focus on it, people are complicated.

You chat a bit with various people in the room, Lois telling you that you’re always welcome to visit whenever you’d like, Barbara talking to you about how her work as Oracle, Steph telling you all about the other vigilantes you’ll probably end up crossing paths with. Tim and Conner sat by you, telling you all about the team and the people you’ll meet once all your training is done.

Slowly, people start to leave, you saw Jason slip out the front door first, sending you a wink. Dick left not long after, needing to return to his responsibilities in Bludhaven, making sure to tell you you’re always welcome to visit him over there. Then Clark left with Lois, Jon, and Conner, leaving the residents of the manor plus, Cass, Steph and Barbara.

Damian and Tim had retreated to their rooms, while Alfred busied himself with household chores, Bruce stood up, approaching you before saying, “Did you still want to go shopping? You’ll need training clothes.”

You nodded, “Yes, please.”

Steph perked up, rushing towards the two of you, “Oh, we have to come.”

“Steph, you go shopping every week. With my card.”

Barbara chimed in, “It’s not about that Bruce, you have a terrible fashion sense. We can’t let you impose that onto Y/n.”

Cass nodded in agreement.

“We’re just buying training clothes.”

“She can’t wear training clothes in her daily life,” Steph rolled her eyes, “She needs a wardrobe.”

You smiled, “I would like a wardrobe.”

“See?”

Bruce sighed but nodded, “Let's go then.”

Steph cheered while Barbara and Cass high-fived behind her, it was an amusing site.

When you arrived at the mall, Steph immediately linked arms with you, dragging you around to her favorite stores, paying no mind to your super strength potentially being able to accidentally break her arm. It caught you off guard, not only the physical display of affection, but the trust.

Again, you felt that soft puddle of warmth pool in your chest. You could get used to that.

You had gotten to know Barbara and Cass fairly well during the trip as well, Barbara was sweet, she and Steph made you laugh more than you thought you could. Cass and you got along well too, she picked out the clothes you liked the most, always nodding in approval when you would try anything on, a soft smile on her face. The three of them opened their group up to you so quickly, it had surprised you, you felt that with their company you were better able to navigate finding yourself.

The four of you hadn’t paid much mind to Bruce trailing behind you as you went from store to store, not that he minded. He held a fond smile as he observed the four of you giggling, talking, and having a good time.

He knew his focus on training was important, but he also knew Lois was right (not that he’d admit that to anyone), you needed a social life too. And he knew your heightened emotional intelligence would surely allow you to obtain that, you just needed to blossom, and allow yourself to break free of the restraints you put on yourself.

He’d lost count of how many times he had swiped his card that day, at some point he had decided to just start waiting by the front, once you guys were ready, he’d walk over, swipe his card, and you guys would move on to the next shop. He wouldn't say this to anyone, but he enjoyed doing things like this, taking care of the people he cares about.

The last store you had gone to was WayneTech, it was Bruce’s idea. You needed a phone in order to keep everyone’s contacts. So they brought you there where you got the latest model of their cell phone line, it was sleek and thin. You picked out a case and you got a screen protector. Bruce had told you that once you got to the Batcave he’d input league contacts, safety features, as well as league-level security settings.

By the end of the trip it was early in the evening, Bruce had his arms absolutely filled with shopping bags, and what he couldn’t carry was carried by you and Steph. The five of you stepped out into the parking lot, the sun setting, casting a deep orange hue on the parking lot. You took in the image in front of you, you didn’t know suns could set so beautifully.

The ride home was nice, the car was filled with the soft chatter of the four of you, Bruce didn’t feel the need to listen in. The soft music playing on the stereo as a background was a nice addition to the atmosphere.

When you’d arrived at the manor, the girls had bid you goodbye, but not before making sure they had your number to add you to their group chat. You were warned by Steph that Cass’s meme game could not be beat. You were slightly confused but nodded, a happy smile on your face. They each gave you a hug before getting in their cars and heading off.

The walk into the manor was silent, but not awkward, mainly the two of you taking armfuls of bags up to your room.

As he shut the door, Bruce turned to you, “It’s not too late, if you want, we could start out on some training.”

You nodded, going into your room to change, “I’ll be down there in a bit.”

He nodded, walking away to change as well.

You entered the Batcave shortly after, comfortable in your black sweatpants, and a black long sleeve athletic shirt. Now, having a better opportunity to take it all in, it was massive. You looked to your left to see Damian sparring with Tim in one of the further training areas. You walked over to Bruce, he gave you a small smile, leading you to the second training area by Tim and Damian, who by now had stopped sparring, in favor of observing your skill.

“You can replicate my fighting style to a tee, right?”

You nodded.

“Let’s see it.”

You charged first, making sure to suppress your strength, your movements swift and calculated, landing a fast right kick to his abdomen. He sidestepped, landing a swift punch to your side. You kept attempting attacks on eachother, each one dodging the other flawlessly.

Tim and Damian watched in awe as the two of you gracefully moved, as if you were dancing. This went on for several minutes, until you attempted a fast left kick to his side, which he caught, using as leverage to flip you over on your back.

Your limbs ached, you looked up at him, “How did you do that?”

He held a hand out to help you up, “I’m not as fast with my left kicks as I am with my right ones. My weaknesses are your weaknesses.”

You nodded. Made sense.

“You have good technique, and you replicate my fighting perfectly, but that’s all it is. A replication. You need to make it your own. Adapt it in accordance with your abilities, you can’t do that now because Clark hasn’t trained you, but in time you will.”

You nodded, your chest swelling with pride at his compliment, you knew after your training with Clark you would be able to better adjust your fighting style.

Damian walked over to you, “Y/n. I’d like to spar, you’ve proven to be a worthy opponent.”

You nodded, it would be good to spar with someone with a different fighting style. Tim sat down to the side, perfectly content with just observing for now, like earlier, he occasionally jotted down some notes on his phone. You decided you didn’t mind it. It was endearing.

This time, Damian charged first, landing a swift right kick to your ribs, you turned and landed a hard kick to his chest, sending him back, before he flipped and caught himself, running towards you again. His smaller frame provided him with an advantage as he jumped onto your shoulders, before he could land his blow, you flipped your body, sending him to the floor, landing on his back with a thud. You crouched over him, extending your hand.

“You okay?”

“Fine.” he took your hand, getting up to his feet, you gave him a soft smile, which he returned, giving you a nod of approval. He, like Bruce, didn’t often use his words, but you were able to discern their intentions just fine.

Bruce then led you to a machine he had in the cave, where it analyzed your genetics in comparison to Clark’s, he had determined you were missing the genetic composition that happened to be the main source of invulnerability, therefore the reason you were the way you were. You are unfortunately still weak when exposed to kryptonite.

You were tired by the end of the night. You felt you had bonded with Damian, he had asked you to spar with him another time, to which you agreed.

The next day, Bruce had sent you over to Smallville, where Clark had decided on training you, ‘A good old fashioned open field’ were his exact words.

He made sure to send you wearing your original suit, not knowing how fast you would be flying, just in case, only you didn’t like it, so you opted to wear some sweats over the suit.

And there you were, floating about 300 feet in the air with him, as he explained the basics of flying.

“You want to create your own leverage, using your flight, you should be able to do this.” He bent one leg, tilting to the right as he effortlessly glided in that direction, he repeated the action only now going in the opposite direction.

You nodded, imitating his movements, gliding from side to side before stopping and looking at him. He smiled brightly at you, “You’re doing great, kid. There was never a point where you didn’t have powers, so this should be easy. Now, we’ll test your speed.”

You nodded, “How are we doing that?”

He pulled out a stopwatch, “I’m going to wait here while you fly to Gotham and back. You know the route?”

You nodded.

“Okay… and…. Go!”

You immediately shot forward, a slightly bumpy start but your body adapted immediately, you felt the wind whip through your hair, and a smile spread across your face as you made a U-turn around Gotham, making it back to Clark in seconds.

“2.6 seconds. That’s good.” He smiled at you.

You went on like that for the next few hours, him giving you encouraging words of advice, and you gained better control over your abilities, him providing you with tips he learned over the years. For that last hour, Jon and Conner joined the two of you, the four of you eventually just playing air tag until Martha and Lois called you in for dinner.

They insisted you stay for dinner, and you had no mind to refuse, spending time with them was nice. Jon insisted he sat next to you at dinner, excitedly talking your ear off about whatever he’d gotten to that day, and sharing his favorite stories about Damian with you. He acts like he doesn't like people, but he’s got a soft spot for a lot of us, were his exact words. You honestly completely agreed, you smiled at him as he continued talking.

That day you’d gotten to know Martha and Jonanthan Kent, who insisted you called them Ma and Pa. They instantly coddled you as if they’d known you since birth, though, in a way, that is technically the case.

They didn't let you leave empty handed, sending you off with tupper-ware filled with leftovers, cookies and pie. You thanked them for their hospitality and headed back to the manor.

The next few months were mainly doing morning and evening training with Bruce, occasionally Dick would stop by to train with you, always telling you he was proud of your improvement, which never failed to make you glow just a little brighter with pride. He’d begun a tradition where he would treat you to a burger after training, or whatever it was you were craving. He said that it was his goal to get you to try every fast food joint in Gotham, deciding that it was just an essential part of living there. You quickly decided you hated fast food, but never said anything because that wasn’t at all what mattered to you, what mattered to you was the bond you were creating with your older brother.

Your relationship with Bruce wasn’t perfect. There were times you saw how focused he was on his mission, neglecting the feelings of those around him, he could be an asshole. And with you still navigating your emotions, you’d get angry and yell, and so would he. If you saw him brushing off Damian, or Tim, one look at the crestfallen expressions on their faces was enough to get you angry. You shouldn’t have been surprised, truthfully, you weren’t. You were too similar. You were just fortunate enough to be surrounded by people early on who could convince you to let them in.

Regardless of the imperfections between you and Bruce, you knew he cared. He always showed it with the small smile he’d give you as he held up two tickets to the movie you had wanted to see. Or in the way he’d lure everyone into the living room with snacks for a movie night. Or how he’d try his best to always express to you that you were doing well. That you were enough, and that you deserved to be there.

You’d grown closer with Tim, too, always willing to help him with his assignments (not that he often needed it, but on the rare occasions his sleep deprived self couldn’t wrap his head around a problem). You’d often go to him when you needed help figuring something out on your phone, to which he would offer a simple solution you hadn’t seen before.

Tim was kind, he showed he cared for you by fixing things, when you cracked your screen protector by accidentally tapping it too hard, he made you a new one that could withstand the force of a bullet. He learned to confide in you over time, telling you about Bernard, expressing his worries to you about whether or not he’s good enough. You’d always tell him he was more than good enough.

Damian had taken to calling you ‘sister’, often challenging and teasing you when he could, you’d developed a relationship where he’d go to you for company. You’d sit in the garden and take in the life around you, while he sat a few feet away and drew it.

Once, he drew you while you weren’t looking, when he finished, he handed it to you without a word and walked away. In the bottom right corner you read ‘Y/n Wayne-Kent’ in neat handwriting, just below that, ‘sister’. That was the first time he’d used that word for you. Your heart swelled.

You continued seeing Steph, Barbara, and Cass, regularly having lunch with them and talking with them on the phone. Barbara, or as you now called her, Babs, was always there to guide you when you needed it, she’d often send you small gifts from time to time, like jewelry that reminded her of you.

Cass and you would often find the most peaceful company in each other. She would listen to you talk about all the things you'd been learning, telling you about her own experience adjusting to a new life.

Steph and you bonded over poorly written hallmark movies, she always giggled madly when you would point out plot inconsistencies, wearing the most confused expression she had ever seen on a person, you didn’t understand why at first, you would just state facts, but you always enjoyed the time with her. She always says you guys should start a podcast, and you always agree. You hope she never asks you what a podcast is... because you genuinely didn't know.

True to his word, you didn’t see Jason often, but there were a few instances where you felt particularly suffocated by Bruce’s training that you took him up on his offer to take you somewhere he wasn’t. Those moments were... nice. Every time, he would bring food, and take you to his apartment, where you talked about books and he introduced you to some of his favorite movies. You didn’t know why he and Bruce didn’t get along, but you chose not to pry.

Alfred had taken a liking to you instantly, he enjoyed giving you etiquette lessons, and would bake all kinds of scones and cookies for you to try. His humor was at times very dry and sarcastic, which never failed to make you laugh. He taught you how to bake once, finding you were exceptionally good at it, ‘Miss Y/n, I think we’ve found your natural talent’. You hadn’t expected to be good at it, but Alfred said you were phenomenal.

You’d also train with Clark 3 times a week, getting even closer with the Kents, integrating yourself in both families. It was interesting being part of two very different families. But you wouldn’t have it any other way.

Clark had shown you a lot about your powers, but it was never just training. It had become a necessity for the two of you to fly to some famous landmark and have lunch together, before flying back to Smallville for more training.

Clark was constantly trying his best for you, he still had his regrets from his initial relationship with Conner, and although he was forgiven and their relationship was rebuilt, he knew he lost time. And he absolutely refused to repeat that and hurt someone else who didn’t deserve it.

You always stayed for dinner, you found that you could never say no to Jon, the one time you tried was awful, you felt so bad that you went back the next day and took him shopping. With Bruce's card, duh.

Jon was stuck to you like glue whenever you were over. He always insisted on sitting by you and talking to you about whatever he’d been up to. He flew around with you a lot, you guys would play games that he taught you how to play. Your favorite moments were when he and Damian would allow you in to watch them play video games because ‘How do you not know how to play video games? That’s just wrong. We’ll teach you.’

Conner had spent more and more time with you as well, telling you about a lot of social cues, the importance of boundaries, etc. He was determined to help you adjust in every way he could, he shared his experiences with you when he first started working in teams. You learned a lot from him, he was very affectionate with you, but in that awkward-older-brother way. He’d give you a soft pat on the back and a smile, he knew you’d do just fine.

Lois became your role model, you truly admired her. She was strong, outspoken, confident. She helped you not be afraid of forming your own opinions and voicing them. One time she saw you yell at Bruce over something he’d done, and all she could do was smile proudly.

These people whose lives you just appeared in one day, very quickly became your family. Every day you were reminded of how lucky you were to have come to care for them as much as you do. Bonding with them was nice, and you very quickly understood the appeal of having family.

These are people who care for you unconditionally, simply because they want to. Because every moment that they spend with you, they choose to.

And just like that, you were ready to meet the team. You had learned to combine your combat skills with your powers, if you need to, you can fight in mid air. You’d learned to incorporate your abilities into your technique to enhance your own personal style. And it felt amazing.

You knew every possible way to deliver an effective, non-lethal blow. Of course, you needed a suit. Bruce offered to enhance the one you had worn the day they rescued you, but you wanted a new one. To you, that suit represented what you were created to be, and that is not who you are. You wanted something true to yourself, and he understood and wholeheartedly supported you. Damian helped you make a sketch, and together you’d designed the perfect representation of you. And you became Eclipse. The alignment of two heroes, though unintentional, created a whole new hero. You.

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