Izuku "Deku" Midoriya (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nextsymbol) wrote2018-04-07 11:47 pm
nextsymbol) wrote2018-04-07 11:47 pm
Application for MoM
〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Batty
AGE: 26
JOURNAL: batty_chan
IM / EMAIL: battypichugirl@gmail.com
PLURK: goodluckmodes
RETURNING: y
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Izuku “Deku” Midoriya
CHARACTER AGE: 15
CANON ORIGIN: My Hero Academia
CHRONOLOGY: Chapter 122
CLASS:The evulest villain obvs Hero
HOUSING: With Bakugo and Momo, please! Preference to Heropa or De Chima
BACKGROUND:
Man is not created equal. This is the truth about the world I learned at the age of four years old.
The life of Midoriya Izuku could be accurately described as split into before meeting All Might, and after.
The first years of his life were carefree and full of excitement, as he eagerly awaited to manifest his Quirk and work toward his dream of becoming a Hero. At the tender age of four, Izuku discovered something crushing--he was one of the 20% of people worldwide who was born without a Quirk. Quirkless, they called it. A weirdo. A loser.
It’s not wrong to dream. However...you need to be realistic, kid.
And then came the moment that would change his life forever. They say, don’t meet your heroes, and at first, it seems such a thing is to ring true for Izuku as well, being told once and for all by the very Symbol of Peace himself to give up on his dream.
For his part, Izuku takes it shockingly well; he’s devastated, of course, but Izuku is good at finding his feet under him when such setbacks occur, able to hold onto hope until the last possible moment, and when he no longer can, he sets to shifting his path to a more realistic course--heartbroken, but having finally found some manner of closure, an end to his long slog toward a dream that nobody believed in.
Top heroes have stories about them going back to their school days. Most of their stories have one thing in common: Their bodies moved before they had a chance to think. That was true for you too, wasn’t it?
But that’s not how the story ends, of course. The sludge villain that had attacked Izuku before escapes from the jar All Might had contained him in, and this time Bakugo is the one trapped in their clutches. None of the Pro Heroes in the area have a useful Quirk for defeating the villain, with even All Might unable to help due to having maxed out his power usage for the day.
The one that turns the tide of what could have been tragedy is Izuku; not with power, of course. Not even with strategy--at the end of the day, he was still a Quirkless kid way out of his league. But charging into the fray with no thought to anything but helping someone in danger inspires All Might, reminding him of the beliefs he lives by--Heroes are always risking their lives. It gives him the strength to force himself to go a little longer with One For All, and just like that, the villain is defeated.
All Might seeks Izuku out in the aftermath to make him an offer: he’s been looking for a successor to pass One for All onto, and he thinks Izuku might be the right person for the job. Izuku accepts, starting off an intense 10-month training regimen to prepare himself to receive All Might’s power, to be finished just in time for U.A.’s entrance exam. The exam itself is a combat simulation of sorts--entrants score points by means of destroying combat robots worth certain amounts of points. Izuku is overwhelmed at first, having only barely received All Might’s power in time for the exam and never even tested it out, and finds the combat stage running out of robots to defeat before he can even get a single point. That’s when the “obstacle” arrives--a massive robot that would be incredibly difficult to defeat, and worth 0 points to boot. The most logical strategy would be to run, especially with time running out to score some points. But there’s a problem--when the obstacle appeared, some of the debris it knocked over trapped one of the examinees under it. Once again, Izuku’s body appears to move before he can think, and he uses All Might’s power for the very first time to smash the obstacle into a pile of scrap before Uraraka can get trampled. Izuku’s body isn’t capable of withstanding the full force of One For All yet, though, and once he attacks, he finds himself plummeting toward certain death with three broken limbs. Uraraka manages to save him with her Gravity quirk, but he’s still unable to move enough to gain any points before time runs out.
Dejected, he returns home, thinking he’s failed the entrance exam and let All Might down. There’s a hidden twist to the exam, though; although it was true that people earned points on the exam by defeating the robots, there was a secondary component to the scoring, determined by a panel of judges: rescue points. Izuku’s brave and selfless actions to protect Uraraka netted him a grand total of 60 rescue points, putting him in the top 10 of exam takers despite his 0 combat points. Thus, Izuku completes the first hurdle on his path to becoming a Hero.
My Deku isn’t always going to mean ‘useless’! Kacchan, my ‘Deku’ means ‘You can do it!’
Dream come true or not, getting into U.A. is only the beginning of Deku’s journey; almost immediately afterward, he’s faced with a challenge that seems like it might end that journey before it even begins. Aizawa has his class perform a series of physical fitness trials, claiming that the student with the lowest combined score will be expelled. Initially, Aizawa seems to have already written off Izuku’s success in the exam, figuring that a Hero who was unable to use his Quirk without crippling themselves would be useless on the field, but Izuku’s quick thinking has him able to devise a strategy to throw the ball far enough to compete with his classmates without making his arm useless right off the bat, which convinces Aizawa he’s not without potential. He also has his first major “victory” as a Hero during the combat training exercise where he and Uraraka are matched up against Iida and Bakugo--which makes for the first time the latter needs to acknowledge Izuku in any capacity.
Training continues as normal until a trip to a nearby training facility, the Unforeseen Situation Joint, where the class is to get training on rescue situations when they’re suddenly attacked by a swarm of villains, led by Shigaraki Tomura and Kurogiri, who introduces them as the League of Villains, whose goal is to kill All Might. However, All Might isn’t present due to having exhausted his power earlier that day, so the League of Villains decides to kill a few of them out of spite, in the hopes that it might draw out All Might. Despite their best efforts, class 1-A finds themselves overwhelmed--Aizawa soundly defeated by a bio-engineered creature called a Nomu and some of the children on the verge of being killed by Shigaraki when All Might bursts onto the scene, having been uneasy when he couldn’t get in touch with the teachers at USJ earlier. He’s able to defeat the Nomu, leading Shigaraki and Kurogiri to escape, but at the cost of a significant chunk of his time limit.
Despite the attack, however, U.A. doesn’t cancel its yearly Sports Festival, an event watched by the entirety of Japan. All students from not only the Hero courses, but also the support, general studies, and business classes compete in the festival, which is a chance to get noticed by various Hero agencies and support companies, etc. as students demonstrate their prowess. Some initial misgivings notwithstanding, Izuku resolves to do his best at the festival, even managing to make his mark by coming in first place in the initial obstacle race, though he loses his second battle in the tournament round to Todoroki after helping him come to embrace the fire side of his Quirk.
After the Sports Festival, the students of Class 1-A are to go on 1 week internships with companies that either made them an offer directly or were otherwise affiliated with U.A. so as to gain more practical field experience with the duties of a Hero. Izuku chooses “Deku” as his tentative Hero name and heads off to his internship with Gran Torino, the man who had formerly trained All Might, where he finally learns how to effectively use One For All without immediately crippling himself.
Unfortunately, it’s at this time that Shigaraki chooses to commit some havoc, seeking to demonstrate his strength to the Hero-Killer Stain, who he had earlier tried to recruit to the League of Villains before things went awry. Stain had earlier injured Iida’s older brother, the Hero Ingenium, and while on his internship, Iida had run off to find Stain and get revenge--something Izuku realizes when Iida is not present at the scene of the chaos Shigaraki orchestrated with the Nomus. Izuku, Todoroki (who also happened to be in the area for his internship), and Iida manage to defeat and capture Stain, though they are required to hide the truth of the incident from the public, since using Quirks in combat without the direct instruction of a licensed Hero is deeply illegal. Afterward, class 1-A studies for their final exams, in which Izuku and Bakugo are paired up to fight against All Might. Despite a tumultuous beginning, Izuku is able to convince Bakugo to work with him rather than refusing out of pride and simply giving up on winning, and they are able to pass.
Stain’s appearance and the chaos with the Nomus are widely assumed to be connected, lending an extra layer of “credibility” to the League of Villains, which becomes more populated by villains who are interested in cashing in on Stain’s reputation. These villains somehow manage to gain intelligence on where the U.A. students are going for extra Quirk training, and they are ambushed in the woods, where a life-or-death struggle ensues. Ultimately, Bakugo is kidnapped, and the damage to Izuku’s arms from overuse of One For All compounds to the point where he’s warned that further damage could lead to permanent paralysis of his arms. Kirishima and Todoroki take Bakugo’s capture particularly hard, and they convince Izuku to go with them on a rescue mission based on information Momo had found on the League of Villains’ whereabouts from a tracker she’d put on a Nomu before it escaped. Iida and Momo join them despite their disapproval, and they are able to retrieve Bakugo during All Might’s climactic battle with All For One, freeing All Might up to fight at full strength. Unfortunately, this causes All Might to use up the last of his power, forcing him to publicly retire.
In the aftermath, U.A. changes its policies so students have to live on campus, and after acquiring permission to do so, Izuku joins the rest of his class in training for the provisional license exam so that they can defend themselves if the League of Villains were to attack again without violating the laws about public Quirk usage. He manages to pass, something that frustrates and agitates Bakugo, who’s been struggling with his kidnapping and All Might’s retirement and ends up challenging Izuku to a knock-down drag-out fight which only wraps up when All Might himself arrives to clear the air personally and fill Bakugo in on the story of Izuku becoming his successor. Having reached a new understanding with his old childhood friend-turned-bully-turned-rival, Izuku and Bakugo find themselves on better footing and ready to move toward the future instead of remaining mired in the past, bonded together by a secret that they both now share with All Might.
PERSONALITY:
In order to talk about Deku, the high school student at the most elite hero school in the country, one must begin with Deku, the Quirkless fanboy with an impossible dream.
For as long as he could remember, Izuku wanted nothing more than to be like the top hero in the country, the Symbol of Peace: All Might. Someone who rescues people with a fearless smile. And Izuku could be said to have had a lot of what it took already; he had resolve, he had a desire to help people, he was analytical and strategic, writing down his observations about the strengths and weaknesses of every Hero in the public eye. There was only one problem: he had no power.
Before meeting All Might, Izuku was a bit of a shrinking violet. Having faced bullying from just about every direction, and none more so than his former childhood friend Bakugo Katsuki--blessed with a powerful Quirk and grown deeply arrogant because of it--Izuku became more withdrawn, shy and timid and awkward. His self-esteem suffered, and he tended to adopt a placatory attitude, especially where Bakugo was concerned (“I-I wasn’t saying I could compete with you!”), but all the same, he continued to admire Bakugo--seeing his natural power and talent as a standard to aim for every bit as much as All Might’s.
There’s more to being a Hero than power, of course. Izuku shows his true mettle in a moment of deep chaos and crisis, reaching out to try to save his tormentor from a sludge monster villain with nothing but the bag on his back to throw at it--when professional Heroes, even All Might himself, in his weakened form, hesitated. A hero saves people because they are in trouble, and Izuku did just that, even when he should have no reason to help the person who had spent years showing him nothing but cruelty, even when there was no hope of defeating the attacker, who had not hours ago nearly killed him. With his sheer force of heart, Izuku manages to inspire the Symbol of Peace himself, who decides he’s already a Hero in all the ways that count, and thus the Quirkless fanboy becomes the great All Might’s successor.
And once All Might starts training him, the change in Izuku is obvious: he becomes more confident, less easily pushed around--he even stands up to Bakugo, who tries to intimidate him out of going to U.A. He shows a drive and focus he never displayed before, once a path opens up toward actually achieving his formerly impossible dream. By the time of the Sports Festival, All Might even manages to stoke a competitive fire in him, a desire to show himself to the world as the Hero who was aiming to be the next Symbol of Peace. He gets stronger and stronger, utilizing his ingenuity and a truly incredible level of pain tolerance to make use of his power to the fullest extent he was capable of.
Even with his burgeoning confidence, Izuku still bears some of the scars of his history; at U.A., he often seems to show signs of imposter syndrome, especially early on, and more than anything, he’s terrified of letting All Might down, of failing to be worthy of the power that was given to him and the opportunity that came with it. At a later canonpoint, when he finds out from Sir Night Eye, All Might’s former sidekick, that One for All was supposed to go to a U.A. student named Mirio, he gets very depressed for awhile until he gets the chance to talk to All Might about it, becoming obviously distracted in class to the point where Aizawa threatens to pull him from his internship.
Despite these misgivings, Izuku’s determination is second-to-none, and he’s resolved to work harder than everyone in order to compensate for the length of experience everyone else has with using their Quirk, willing to break his body over and over in order to follow his dreams, up until he learns a better way to use his power. He takes extremely detailed and intricate notes on everyone’s Quirks, so as to inform his strategy on training exercises and at the Sports Festival, and improve on his own weaknesses; when Gran Torino helps Izuku use his powers in a more sustainable manner than breaking limbs or fingers on each activation, Izuku takes on the most useful aspects of Bakugo’s movement style.
Ultimately, though, what really makes Izuku a hero isn’t about his power or determination or work ethic: as All Might says, “meddling when you don’t need to...is the essence of being a Hero”, and that statement summarizes Izuku to a tee. He is a very keenly empathetic individual, and tries to help even when it’s to his active detriment. He notes that Todoroki always seemed so sad when he fought, and he helps his classmate come to terms with the fire side of his power, though it causes him to lose their match at the Sports Festival. He worries about Kouta, who hates their world of Quirks and Heroes due to the loss of his parents, and goes out of his way to try to help him find peace with it, despite the kid being rude to him and even punching him. He’s able to save Iida from being killed by Stain due to figuring out that his friend must have found the Hero Killer when he left the Hero he was interning with in the midst of all the chaos with the Nomu, in the city where Stain had last appeared and attacked his brother. It’s even implied that the basis of Bakugo’s grudge against him is the time he fell off a footbridge into a small pond and Izuku immediately ran to check if he was okay, despite being Quirkless, and thus to Bakugo’s eyes, inferior.
For all that Izuku’s grown and changed since he gained One for All, the traits that are core to him--the ones that made All Might choose him as his successor in the first place--are still the same. And it’s those traits that gain the (sometimes grudging) respect of everyone around him, eventually even Bakugo, to an extent.
POWER:
One For All: A Quirk that allows the user access to stockpiled power, giving them superhuman speed and destructive force, which can be passed on from user to user. It’s implied that One For All gets stronger with each new user, and Izuku is the 9th-generation user. One For All can be passed on by having the recipient ingest the user’s DNA, though it requires the user’s consent so it cannot be forcibly stolen. It can, however, be forcibly passed on, though that won’t be relevant in game.
The maximum potential of One For All is never precisely specified; All Might once throws a punch with enough air pressure that he literally caused it to start raining from the updraft forming clouds. Another time, Izuku is able to create a massive whirlpool by focusing One For All into two fingers and flicking them, aiming the resultant shock wave at the water. However, because Izuku’s body isn’t strong enough to handle it yet, using One For All at full 100% power causes a fracture in that bone, whether it’s his fingers, arms, or legs.
Basically in-game I’m going to play it by ear for combat situations and avoid godmoding as much as possible, but there’s no real good metric for just how powerful One For All is or what its limits are beyond the bone fracture problems.
Notebook Hammerspace (non-canon): The ability to store and/or generate an infinite supply of notebooks. He can’t store anything else in this hammerspace, only notebooks.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[Okay, vlog time. Introducing yourself to an entire community of strangers….it kind of feels higher pressure than just commenting around on discussion forums like he used to back home, but it seems to be more or less the norm here?
The boy on the screen looks to be about fifteen, with messy green-black hair and a few freckles. He rubs at his neck nervously before he starts talking.]
H-hi….! Um, my name is Midoriya Izuku, and I’m very new here. Back home, I was a first year in the hero course at U.A. High School, but I can’t really get any more training here, so--so I was wondering…
[He swallows. Come on, come on, don’t lose your nerve, Midoriya….! Your “Deku” means “you can do it!”, remember?]
Would any of the pro heroes here be interested in taking on an intern? [A brief beat, then:] I-I won’t get in your way, I promise! I just passed my provisional license exam, and everything, it’s just--I know I need more experience before I try to work as a pro myself, so….
[Izuku trails off, sighing. Time to put a fork in this and end its misery. He bows at the screen.]
Thank you very much for your time! It’s nice to meet all of you!
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: https://etcelsior.dreamwidth.org/64209.html?thread=43954385#cmt43954385
FINAL NOTES: Can he port in with his Hero costume, even though he wasn’t wearing it at his canonpoint?
NAME: Batty
AGE: 26
JOURNAL: batty_chan
IM / EMAIL: battypichugirl@gmail.com
PLURK: goodluckmodes
RETURNING: y
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Izuku “Deku” Midoriya
CHARACTER AGE: 15
CANON ORIGIN: My Hero Academia
CHRONOLOGY: Chapter 122
CLASS:
HOUSING: With Bakugo and Momo, please! Preference to Heropa or De Chima
BACKGROUND:
Man is not created equal. This is the truth about the world I learned at the age of four years old.
The life of Midoriya Izuku could be accurately described as split into before meeting All Might, and after.
The first years of his life were carefree and full of excitement, as he eagerly awaited to manifest his Quirk and work toward his dream of becoming a Hero. At the tender age of four, Izuku discovered something crushing--he was one of the 20% of people worldwide who was born without a Quirk. Quirkless, they called it. A weirdo. A loser.
It’s not wrong to dream. However...you need to be realistic, kid.
And then came the moment that would change his life forever. They say, don’t meet your heroes, and at first, it seems such a thing is to ring true for Izuku as well, being told once and for all by the very Symbol of Peace himself to give up on his dream.
For his part, Izuku takes it shockingly well; he’s devastated, of course, but Izuku is good at finding his feet under him when such setbacks occur, able to hold onto hope until the last possible moment, and when he no longer can, he sets to shifting his path to a more realistic course--heartbroken, but having finally found some manner of closure, an end to his long slog toward a dream that nobody believed in.
Top heroes have stories about them going back to their school days. Most of their stories have one thing in common: Their bodies moved before they had a chance to think. That was true for you too, wasn’t it?
But that’s not how the story ends, of course. The sludge villain that had attacked Izuku before escapes from the jar All Might had contained him in, and this time Bakugo is the one trapped in their clutches. None of the Pro Heroes in the area have a useful Quirk for defeating the villain, with even All Might unable to help due to having maxed out his power usage for the day.
The one that turns the tide of what could have been tragedy is Izuku; not with power, of course. Not even with strategy--at the end of the day, he was still a Quirkless kid way out of his league. But charging into the fray with no thought to anything but helping someone in danger inspires All Might, reminding him of the beliefs he lives by--Heroes are always risking their lives. It gives him the strength to force himself to go a little longer with One For All, and just like that, the villain is defeated.
All Might seeks Izuku out in the aftermath to make him an offer: he’s been looking for a successor to pass One for All onto, and he thinks Izuku might be the right person for the job. Izuku accepts, starting off an intense 10-month training regimen to prepare himself to receive All Might’s power, to be finished just in time for U.A.’s entrance exam. The exam itself is a combat simulation of sorts--entrants score points by means of destroying combat robots worth certain amounts of points. Izuku is overwhelmed at first, having only barely received All Might’s power in time for the exam and never even tested it out, and finds the combat stage running out of robots to defeat before he can even get a single point. That’s when the “obstacle” arrives--a massive robot that would be incredibly difficult to defeat, and worth 0 points to boot. The most logical strategy would be to run, especially with time running out to score some points. But there’s a problem--when the obstacle appeared, some of the debris it knocked over trapped one of the examinees under it. Once again, Izuku’s body appears to move before he can think, and he uses All Might’s power for the very first time to smash the obstacle into a pile of scrap before Uraraka can get trampled. Izuku’s body isn’t capable of withstanding the full force of One For All yet, though, and once he attacks, he finds himself plummeting toward certain death with three broken limbs. Uraraka manages to save him with her Gravity quirk, but he’s still unable to move enough to gain any points before time runs out.
Dejected, he returns home, thinking he’s failed the entrance exam and let All Might down. There’s a hidden twist to the exam, though; although it was true that people earned points on the exam by defeating the robots, there was a secondary component to the scoring, determined by a panel of judges: rescue points. Izuku’s brave and selfless actions to protect Uraraka netted him a grand total of 60 rescue points, putting him in the top 10 of exam takers despite his 0 combat points. Thus, Izuku completes the first hurdle on his path to becoming a Hero.
My Deku isn’t always going to mean ‘useless’! Kacchan, my ‘Deku’ means ‘You can do it!’
Dream come true or not, getting into U.A. is only the beginning of Deku’s journey; almost immediately afterward, he’s faced with a challenge that seems like it might end that journey before it even begins. Aizawa has his class perform a series of physical fitness trials, claiming that the student with the lowest combined score will be expelled. Initially, Aizawa seems to have already written off Izuku’s success in the exam, figuring that a Hero who was unable to use his Quirk without crippling themselves would be useless on the field, but Izuku’s quick thinking has him able to devise a strategy to throw the ball far enough to compete with his classmates without making his arm useless right off the bat, which convinces Aizawa he’s not without potential. He also has his first major “victory” as a Hero during the combat training exercise where he and Uraraka are matched up against Iida and Bakugo--which makes for the first time the latter needs to acknowledge Izuku in any capacity.
Training continues as normal until a trip to a nearby training facility, the Unforeseen Situation Joint, where the class is to get training on rescue situations when they’re suddenly attacked by a swarm of villains, led by Shigaraki Tomura and Kurogiri, who introduces them as the League of Villains, whose goal is to kill All Might. However, All Might isn’t present due to having exhausted his power earlier that day, so the League of Villains decides to kill a few of them out of spite, in the hopes that it might draw out All Might. Despite their best efforts, class 1-A finds themselves overwhelmed--Aizawa soundly defeated by a bio-engineered creature called a Nomu and some of the children on the verge of being killed by Shigaraki when All Might bursts onto the scene, having been uneasy when he couldn’t get in touch with the teachers at USJ earlier. He’s able to defeat the Nomu, leading Shigaraki and Kurogiri to escape, but at the cost of a significant chunk of his time limit.
Despite the attack, however, U.A. doesn’t cancel its yearly Sports Festival, an event watched by the entirety of Japan. All students from not only the Hero courses, but also the support, general studies, and business classes compete in the festival, which is a chance to get noticed by various Hero agencies and support companies, etc. as students demonstrate their prowess. Some initial misgivings notwithstanding, Izuku resolves to do his best at the festival, even managing to make his mark by coming in first place in the initial obstacle race, though he loses his second battle in the tournament round to Todoroki after helping him come to embrace the fire side of his Quirk.
After the Sports Festival, the students of Class 1-A are to go on 1 week internships with companies that either made them an offer directly or were otherwise affiliated with U.A. so as to gain more practical field experience with the duties of a Hero. Izuku chooses “Deku” as his tentative Hero name and heads off to his internship with Gran Torino, the man who had formerly trained All Might, where he finally learns how to effectively use One For All without immediately crippling himself.
Unfortunately, it’s at this time that Shigaraki chooses to commit some havoc, seeking to demonstrate his strength to the Hero-Killer Stain, who he had earlier tried to recruit to the League of Villains before things went awry. Stain had earlier injured Iida’s older brother, the Hero Ingenium, and while on his internship, Iida had run off to find Stain and get revenge--something Izuku realizes when Iida is not present at the scene of the chaos Shigaraki orchestrated with the Nomus. Izuku, Todoroki (who also happened to be in the area for his internship), and Iida manage to defeat and capture Stain, though they are required to hide the truth of the incident from the public, since using Quirks in combat without the direct instruction of a licensed Hero is deeply illegal. Afterward, class 1-A studies for their final exams, in which Izuku and Bakugo are paired up to fight against All Might. Despite a tumultuous beginning, Izuku is able to convince Bakugo to work with him rather than refusing out of pride and simply giving up on winning, and they are able to pass.
Stain’s appearance and the chaos with the Nomus are widely assumed to be connected, lending an extra layer of “credibility” to the League of Villains, which becomes more populated by villains who are interested in cashing in on Stain’s reputation. These villains somehow manage to gain intelligence on where the U.A. students are going for extra Quirk training, and they are ambushed in the woods, where a life-or-death struggle ensues. Ultimately, Bakugo is kidnapped, and the damage to Izuku’s arms from overuse of One For All compounds to the point where he’s warned that further damage could lead to permanent paralysis of his arms. Kirishima and Todoroki take Bakugo’s capture particularly hard, and they convince Izuku to go with them on a rescue mission based on information Momo had found on the League of Villains’ whereabouts from a tracker she’d put on a Nomu before it escaped. Iida and Momo join them despite their disapproval, and they are able to retrieve Bakugo during All Might’s climactic battle with All For One, freeing All Might up to fight at full strength. Unfortunately, this causes All Might to use up the last of his power, forcing him to publicly retire.
In the aftermath, U.A. changes its policies so students have to live on campus, and after acquiring permission to do so, Izuku joins the rest of his class in training for the provisional license exam so that they can defend themselves if the League of Villains were to attack again without violating the laws about public Quirk usage. He manages to pass, something that frustrates and agitates Bakugo, who’s been struggling with his kidnapping and All Might’s retirement and ends up challenging Izuku to a knock-down drag-out fight which only wraps up when All Might himself arrives to clear the air personally and fill Bakugo in on the story of Izuku becoming his successor. Having reached a new understanding with his old childhood friend-turned-bully-turned-rival, Izuku and Bakugo find themselves on better footing and ready to move toward the future instead of remaining mired in the past, bonded together by a secret that they both now share with All Might.
PERSONALITY:
In order to talk about Deku, the high school student at the most elite hero school in the country, one must begin with Deku, the Quirkless fanboy with an impossible dream.
For as long as he could remember, Izuku wanted nothing more than to be like the top hero in the country, the Symbol of Peace: All Might. Someone who rescues people with a fearless smile. And Izuku could be said to have had a lot of what it took already; he had resolve, he had a desire to help people, he was analytical and strategic, writing down his observations about the strengths and weaknesses of every Hero in the public eye. There was only one problem: he had no power.
Before meeting All Might, Izuku was a bit of a shrinking violet. Having faced bullying from just about every direction, and none more so than his former childhood friend Bakugo Katsuki--blessed with a powerful Quirk and grown deeply arrogant because of it--Izuku became more withdrawn, shy and timid and awkward. His self-esteem suffered, and he tended to adopt a placatory attitude, especially where Bakugo was concerned (“I-I wasn’t saying I could compete with you!”), but all the same, he continued to admire Bakugo--seeing his natural power and talent as a standard to aim for every bit as much as All Might’s.
There’s more to being a Hero than power, of course. Izuku shows his true mettle in a moment of deep chaos and crisis, reaching out to try to save his tormentor from a sludge monster villain with nothing but the bag on his back to throw at it--when professional Heroes, even All Might himself, in his weakened form, hesitated. A hero saves people because they are in trouble, and Izuku did just that, even when he should have no reason to help the person who had spent years showing him nothing but cruelty, even when there was no hope of defeating the attacker, who had not hours ago nearly killed him. With his sheer force of heart, Izuku manages to inspire the Symbol of Peace himself, who decides he’s already a Hero in all the ways that count, and thus the Quirkless fanboy becomes the great All Might’s successor.
And once All Might starts training him, the change in Izuku is obvious: he becomes more confident, less easily pushed around--he even stands up to Bakugo, who tries to intimidate him out of going to U.A. He shows a drive and focus he never displayed before, once a path opens up toward actually achieving his formerly impossible dream. By the time of the Sports Festival, All Might even manages to stoke a competitive fire in him, a desire to show himself to the world as the Hero who was aiming to be the next Symbol of Peace. He gets stronger and stronger, utilizing his ingenuity and a truly incredible level of pain tolerance to make use of his power to the fullest extent he was capable of.
Even with his burgeoning confidence, Izuku still bears some of the scars of his history; at U.A., he often seems to show signs of imposter syndrome, especially early on, and more than anything, he’s terrified of letting All Might down, of failing to be worthy of the power that was given to him and the opportunity that came with it. At a later canonpoint, when he finds out from Sir Night Eye, All Might’s former sidekick, that One for All was supposed to go to a U.A. student named Mirio, he gets very depressed for awhile until he gets the chance to talk to All Might about it, becoming obviously distracted in class to the point where Aizawa threatens to pull him from his internship.
Despite these misgivings, Izuku’s determination is second-to-none, and he’s resolved to work harder than everyone in order to compensate for the length of experience everyone else has with using their Quirk, willing to break his body over and over in order to follow his dreams, up until he learns a better way to use his power. He takes extremely detailed and intricate notes on everyone’s Quirks, so as to inform his strategy on training exercises and at the Sports Festival, and improve on his own weaknesses; when Gran Torino helps Izuku use his powers in a more sustainable manner than breaking limbs or fingers on each activation, Izuku takes on the most useful aspects of Bakugo’s movement style.
Ultimately, though, what really makes Izuku a hero isn’t about his power or determination or work ethic: as All Might says, “meddling when you don’t need to...is the essence of being a Hero”, and that statement summarizes Izuku to a tee. He is a very keenly empathetic individual, and tries to help even when it’s to his active detriment. He notes that Todoroki always seemed so sad when he fought, and he helps his classmate come to terms with the fire side of his power, though it causes him to lose their match at the Sports Festival. He worries about Kouta, who hates their world of Quirks and Heroes due to the loss of his parents, and goes out of his way to try to help him find peace with it, despite the kid being rude to him and even punching him. He’s able to save Iida from being killed by Stain due to figuring out that his friend must have found the Hero Killer when he left the Hero he was interning with in the midst of all the chaos with the Nomu, in the city where Stain had last appeared and attacked his brother. It’s even implied that the basis of Bakugo’s grudge against him is the time he fell off a footbridge into a small pond and Izuku immediately ran to check if he was okay, despite being Quirkless, and thus to Bakugo’s eyes, inferior.
For all that Izuku’s grown and changed since he gained One for All, the traits that are core to him--the ones that made All Might choose him as his successor in the first place--are still the same. And it’s those traits that gain the (sometimes grudging) respect of everyone around him, eventually even Bakugo, to an extent.
POWER:
One For All: A Quirk that allows the user access to stockpiled power, giving them superhuman speed and destructive force, which can be passed on from user to user. It’s implied that One For All gets stronger with each new user, and Izuku is the 9th-generation user. One For All can be passed on by having the recipient ingest the user’s DNA, though it requires the user’s consent so it cannot be forcibly stolen. It can, however, be forcibly passed on, though that won’t be relevant in game.
The maximum potential of One For All is never precisely specified; All Might once throws a punch with enough air pressure that he literally caused it to start raining from the updraft forming clouds. Another time, Izuku is able to create a massive whirlpool by focusing One For All into two fingers and flicking them, aiming the resultant shock wave at the water. However, because Izuku’s body isn’t strong enough to handle it yet, using One For All at full 100% power causes a fracture in that bone, whether it’s his fingers, arms, or legs.
- Full Cowl: The power control strategy learned from Gran Torino: instead of directing One For All to a specific part of his body and attempting to limit the output of power there, Izuku can activate One For All throughout his entire body at the 8% level as of his canonpoint, offering him a boost of speed and strength. It’s also unclear just how much power is available at 8%. He’s able to all but outpace Bakugo, and we see him able to hop around walls and rooftops with ease at the 5% level, so it’s probably equivalent to standard “superstrength” along with the air-pressure component. He’s able to push All Might to his knees with a direct hit from One For All, so he could probably knock someone about his size over, since at 100% he was able blast apart the “obstacle” robot from the entrance exam.
There’s also one scene where Izuku attacks a villain with 1,000,000% power, causing such extensive damage to his ligaments that he’s warned if he injures himself even 2 or 3 more times his arms will be permanently paralyzed, but does cause a villain with a massive muscle-enhancing Quirk to go flying off the side of a cliff.
Shoot Style: Using One For All for leg-based attacks to lessen the strain on his arms. Given that leg muscles are typically stronger than arm muscles, optimizing One For All’s Full Cowl for his legs gives him more offensive power and stability--which are further enhanced by the iron armor soles in his shoes, which create “blowback” when receiving a powerful impact.
Basically in-game I’m going to play it by ear for combat situations and avoid godmoding as much as possible, but there’s no real good metric for just how powerful One For All is or what its limits are beyond the bone fracture problems.
Notebook Hammerspace (non-canon): The ability to store and/or generate an infinite supply of notebooks. He can’t store anything else in this hammerspace, only notebooks.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[Okay, vlog time. Introducing yourself to an entire community of strangers….it kind of feels higher pressure than just commenting around on discussion forums like he used to back home, but it seems to be more or less the norm here?
The boy on the screen looks to be about fifteen, with messy green-black hair and a few freckles. He rubs at his neck nervously before he starts talking.]
H-hi….! Um, my name is Midoriya Izuku, and I’m very new here. Back home, I was a first year in the hero course at U.A. High School, but I can’t really get any more training here, so--so I was wondering…
[He swallows. Come on, come on, don’t lose your nerve, Midoriya….! Your “Deku” means “you can do it!”, remember?]
Would any of the pro heroes here be interested in taking on an intern? [A brief beat, then:] I-I won’t get in your way, I promise! I just passed my provisional license exam, and everything, it’s just--I know I need more experience before I try to work as a pro myself, so….
[Izuku trails off, sighing. Time to put a fork in this and end its misery. He bows at the screen.]
Thank you very much for your time! It’s nice to meet all of you!
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: https://etcelsior.dreamwidth.org/64209.html?thread=43954385#cmt43954385
FINAL NOTES: Can he port in with his Hero costume, even though he wasn’t wearing it at his canonpoint?