Comment on We Are Here: The Emerald Spark

  1. Lord_Raine on Chapter 1 Thu 11 Aug 2022 10:51PM UTC

    I have no particular intention of bashing Aizawa. I like All Might, and I don't hate Aizawa. But the original oneshot this morphed into involved a premise that requires an expulsion, because Izuku has to be expelled for him to be able to come back and save the USJ anyway as All Might's apprentice or sidekick. So it has to happen.

    People in fandoms generally don't appreciate when their favored characters get the short end of the stick, but in canon, both Shinso and Aizawa are, well. They're both assholes. Shinso repeatedly picked fights with all of A-1 for no particularly good reason. And for all that he complains about being given the short end of the proverbial stick with a 'villainous' quirk, he uses it excessively for petty reasons and we were never shown any evidence that he did so much as a single situp before joining 1-A to improve himself beyond using his quirk to coast along. The best example of this is the sports festival, where he basically did nothing on his own and just got as far as he could with just his quirk before losing spectacularly because he had nothing besides his quirk. And Aizawa has biases in his teaching methods and is somewhat cruel and callous in how he handles his classroom. He is also somewhat hypocritical. He doesn't like people who coast on their quirks, but likes Shinsho, even though if he actually held to his own standards, Shinsho would have "zero potential," since he's never really bothered to try and improve himself.

    Aizawa's preaching about not playing favorites rings a little hollow when Shinsho gets to learn how to use the capture scarf, and not, say, Kaminari, the student who could arguably get the most out of it, since he's a living taser man that's desperate for ranged options in his arsenal.

    Granted, you can also make Toshinori, and many other characters, look pretty bad if you care to. You could absolutely trash All Might using nothing but straight canon if you wanted. That's part and parcel of any story with kids going on adventures. There's always going to be an undertone of "where are all the adults and why are they allowing this to happen." It's even present here in my story. Torino and All Might are being fundamentally irrational, because the smart play would be to get Izuku into Gen Ed or Support, let him grow up and make friends, put him in the best police academy in the country, get him trained in analysis and criminal law, and then fake a traumatic brain injury when he's 25 to cover the transfer of One For All and have him 'wake up' from his 'surgery' with a new trauma-activated quirk that he now won't have trouble controlling because he's bigger, older, stronger, and has been trained for nearly a decade to handle it and the responsibilities he'll be inheriting when he retires as a cop and becomes the new top pro with his big new quirk. But of course, if I did that, there would be no story. Or the League would take over the world while Izuku was training to be a cop or something. Which is a sort of interesting premise for an adultfic, I might keep that in my back pocket for later.

    But the tl;dr is that I don't think I need to make Aizawa out of character, or even really exaggerate him, to expel Izuku. Whether Aizawa expelled him over the broken finger thing or not was honestly a coin flip even in canon. In my mind, making Izuku trained and competent before the quirk apprehension test doesn't really matter for the sake of passing it. What matters is, can Izuku use Full Cowl or not? Here, the answer will be no. Not yet. He'll still break his finger during the test. And that's all Aizawa really needs to expel him. There will be other factors in play, but that's the general gist of it. Izuku was on the knife's edge in canon. It only takes a little push, in my mind, to make it tip over.

    I fully intend to show Aizawa's thought process about this, and some of the issues implied with him being so free with expulsions will be brought up later. I can't totally justify everything that everybody does, but I can at least add some layers on top of it to sell the realism. Sometimes that's all you can do.

    As for students losing faith in UA and people walking out, well. You'll just have to wait and see. The USJ scene can't exactly happen if there's nobody there to save. It won't be canon, but I might do an omake or something where the joke ending to this story is the League shows up to the USJ and nobody is there because the class already ditched UA to go hang out at Might Tower with Izuku.

    Last Edited Thu 11 Aug 2022 11:17PM UTC

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    1. We5tVi3w on Chapter 1 Fri 12 Aug 2022 02:43AM UTC

      But here's the thing, most people who trash All Might try to make him look like a bumbling idiot who has never read a book in his life, and then they act like that's canonically true. Ignoring the fact All Might is one of the only confirmed heroes in Japan that has a college degree and Aizawa, the guy with poor hygiene and only a highschool degree and no other subject degrees, is smarter than him.

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      1. SonnieCelanna on Chapter 1 Sat 13 Aug 2022 11:34PM UTC

        MinaJirou

        This is nothing to do with criticism or anything of the sort, since I know you were just using an idion and not an actual statement of fact but I just wanted to point out its kinda funny you use that phrase, and makes the people who do that kind of bashing even more questionable since *technically* one of the only people we have one hundred percent definite canonical proof of reading a book in the show itself is All Might, considering the whole "teaching for dummies" gag.

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        1. We5tVi3w on Chapter 1 Sun 14 Aug 2022 02:16AM UTC

          Well yeah, but considering all he had to do was read a goddamn teaching book just to be on the same par, if not above, the other teachers in terms of skills says a lot. Like it or not, post-retirement All Might is the best teacher at UA, considering Aizawa's negligence, Nezu's sadism, Midnight's pervertedness and Vlad's insistence on rivalries, All Might is the most "normal" and supportive teacher the kids have.

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          1. SonnieCelanna on Chapter 1 Sun 14 Aug 2022 02:17AM UTC

            MinaJirou

            Oh not disagreeing at all, was just pointing out a funny coincidence

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    3. Armedndangerous (Guest) on Chapter 1 Sun 14 Aug 2022 02:20AM UTC

      If he's ever needed back at u.a. you can always just have nezu pull the old f*ck you he's my private student card. Also if any pre license exam bakugo is in a 1-A class that midoriya gets kicked out of, he is one of the only students staying for the sake of gloating alone.

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