I'm So Glad People Actually Talk About This!! The Whole First Episode Is Spent Building Up Izuku's Backstory

I'm so glad people actually talk about this!! The whole first episode is spent building up Izuku's backstory just for it to never matter outside of him not knowing how to use his quirk.

The worst part is that 1) mha isn't known for having shitty backstories, many of the characters are known specifically for their well written stories (the todorokis, most of the league, even the relationship between bakugo and izuku before and throughout canon) so it's incredibly frustrating to see the main character's hardly affect him after a while

and 2) that the original plot WAS that Izuku would stay quirkless and use weapons to become a hero. I'm not sure how true this part is, but I've heard that the reason it was changed is because one of the editors convinced horikoshi that the main character not having a superpower would make it boring.

MHA: Izuku Midoriya

I know I'm kicking a hornets nest here, but I feel like Izuku was more interesting as a protagonist before he got a handle on One for All. Like, way back when he was still breaking his own bones on the regular. It just feels like he got super powerful and it doesn't have a cost or stakes for him anymore. (I'm not saying it doesn't, I'm saying it doesn't feel like it.) It also kind of undermines who he started off as.

Like, he was a smart and goodhearted kid who wanted to be a hero, but didn't have a Quirk. On that premise, I would have expected him to Batman or Iron Man his way into heroics. Instead, they kind of Green Lantern/Blue Beetle it. Which is fine, sort of. Except GL and BB origins are usually good people going about their business and suddenly granted power they feel obligated to do good with. It vibes differently for a kid who desperately wants to do good and is suddenly given the powers of Superman (and later everyone else in the justice league). Comparison is getting away from me.

Giving that power to an untrained, unprepared child feels like Izuku is being taken advantage of. And he kind of was. There were better options, for both passing on the Quirk and training the recipient. But narratively it also helps give Izuku seemingly impossible expectations to live up to and a very short timeframe to do it in. It keeps him an underdog, even with access to unholy levels of power. And we were introduced to MHA as an underdog story.

As Izuku struggles to become the hero we (the audience) know he can become, we also watch him lose the rose-tinted view of heroics. The system is corrupt. Its not just a few cowards who don't help because of a bad quirk match-up (I have strong feelings about the sludge villain incident), its built into the system. If the story had stayed more on that, I think I would have enjoyed where it went. You can have the most powerful hero in the world and a corrupt system will still leave them the underdog.

But instead they make it more of a legacy 1v1. All Might v All for One, then Izuku v Shigaraki. Which might be easier to illustrate and finish, but it less narratively satisfying. I get that this is battle shounen, and they're all about their big power-scale-shattering fights with their arch enemies, but was it weird I was sort of expecting better by a certain point?