Fanfic / Back to the Beginning

Back to the Beginning is an on-going My Hero Academia fanfic written by Aliandris. The story follows the Ninth Holders of One For All, in two different timelines regretting their final moments. Until One For All activates a previously unknown quirk giving them both a second chance. Sending them back in time, the two users are linked as seek a new, better future.

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Back to the Beginning provides examples of:

• 11th-Hour Superpower: One For All happens to become this. As both Midoriya and Uraraka are laying in their final moments, defeated, One For All unlocks the final quirk, Lucky 13.
• Adaptational Angst Downgrade: Well, more along the lines of Adaptational Sanity Upgrade, as thanks to Izuku's intervention, Himiko Toga is found and subdued quickly after her canon psychotic break, allowing her to receive therapy and become adopted by the Midoriyas, while her Abusive Parents are arrested and jailed, preventing her from becoming the Psycho Knife Nut she became in canon.
• Adaptational Badass: One For All gave Ochaka's Gravity Master powers a massive upgrade, allowing her to choose to either remove or greatly increase a target's gravity.
• Adapted Out: One For All does not cause Life Drain on bearers who already have a Quirk.
• Adaptational Early Appearance:
  • Several characters such as Aizawa, Nezu, Recovery Girl, All Might, Himiko Toga, and Detective Tsukauchi meet Izuku two and a half years before UA.
• Adaptational Modesty: The first day of Foundational Heroics, All Might takes Eijiro, Momo, and Toru aside and teaches them about DNA-encoded costumes, setting things up for them to get costumes that reveal far less skin and give much better protection.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: A retroactive example: The Second Torchbearer's Quirk in canon was later revealed to be Gearshift. Here, it's Lucky 13.
• Ascended Extra: Canonically, Melissa Shield only appeared in My Hero Academia: Two Heroes. Here, she's going to attend U.A. in the Support Course as the support specialist for Izuku and Ochako.
• Big Damn Kiss: Izuku and Ochako share their first kiss on chapter 47.
• Chef of Iron: Izuku has inherited Inko's cooking skills on top of being one of the Ninth Torchbearers of One For All.
• Composite Character: This story's version of Stain is a combination of the both Izuku's timeline and Ochako's Stendhal, where he kills the heroes he targets and exposes their corruption after doing so.
• Dark Secret: Played for Laughs with Aizawa, who is in a relationship with Ms. Joke and wears a pair of cat pajamas at bed at night.
• Deadly Doctor: Recovery Girl surprisingly. Once Izuku reveals knowledge of One For All to her, she blitzes across the room faster than he could react.
• Death by Adaptation: Izuku and Ochako are killed in their respective timelines during the events of the Paranormal Liberation War. In Ochako's timeline both her and Analyst are killed by Toga, and on Izuku's, he and Uravity are dusted by Shigaraki.
• Devious Daggers: While far saner than she was in Izuku and Ochako's timelines, Himiko still has a preference for using knives as her weapons.
• Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest: Defied, by both Izuku and Ochako. Both are afraid of projecting their unresolved feelings for Uravity and Analyst on to each other, which is why it takes for long for them to realize they are in love. Eventually, the teenagers come to terms that they are in love with each other, and the feelings for their respective counterparts have long been put to rest.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: Lucky 13 cannot be activated in the time period it has sent its user to, thereby preventing Izuku and Ochako from being able to exploit its power if something goes terribly wrong.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The story focuses on sending Midoriya and Uraraka back to the beginning of the series when Midoriya was quirkless and they were both in middle school.
• Expy: Aika Shizu. Her quirk is activated by singing, she studies Bajiquan, and her favorite Idol Singer group is Zwei Wing. She's basically Hibiki Tachibana, as the author has confessed to liking Symphogear. Sure enough, her starting hero costume is a 1:1 recreation of Hibiki's starting Symphogear.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • As soon as Rappa finds out that Overhaul is experimenting on Eri for the Quirk-destroying bullets, he immediatly turns against his partner Tengai, since he only joined the Yakuza to fight the strongest people.
  • The Yakuza Boss, upon finding out that Overhaul went on with his deranged experiments without his consent immediately cooperates with the Pros and the police to arrest him.
• Future Me Scares Me:
  • David Shield is devastated upon learning his action regarding the I-Island attack in the other timeline.
  • Himiko is heartbroken upon finding out that in both Izuku and Ochako's timelines she became the villain her parents all said she was.
• Happily Adopted:
  • Himiko is adopted by the Midoriyas following the Shie Hassaikai raid. Her sister Hifumi is adopted by another family as well, after the Togas are arrested.
  • Aizawa who already adopted Eri in the original does the same alongside Ms. Joke on this one after she is saved.
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • In spite of the Second Torchbearer's Adaptational Superpower Change, his canon Quirk still exists as the Quirk of Homura Shigaraki, AKA Hana Shimura.
  • Just like Izuku's original timeline, Inasa Yoarashi refuses to attend UA despite acing the recommended exam due a disagreement with Shoto.
  • Izuku's attempt to encourage Hitoshi Shinso bears no fruit, seeing him not do anything that could have earned him points, causing him to end up in General Studies.
  • Yuga Aoyama is still the traitor in Class 1-A.
• Love Confession: Izuku and Ochako finally share their feelings for each other in chapter 47.
• Mental Time Travel: The Second Torchbearer's Quirk, Lucky 13, grants this power. Originally only capable of sending him back in time by 13 seconds, over a century of One For All boosting it allowed him to send Izuku and Ochako two years into the past.
• Never Mess with Granny: As soon as Recovery Girl hears Izuku mention One For All, she instantly has him in a sleeper hold.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: For a given value of hero. Stain's efforts to remove false heroes by giving them a Karmic Death tied to their corruption causes him to attack honest heroes working an undercover operation while missing the actual corrupt hero they were working undercover to try to find.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: During the Shie Hassaikai raid, Overhaul tries to Retgone All Might by injecting Eri with Trigger and throwing her at the Symbol of Peace. But thanks to Eraserhead's intervention, all this does is restore Toshinori to his physical prime.
• One-Steve Limit: To ensure that they are clear when they are talking about each other and when they are talking about their future alternates, Izuku and Ochako respectively refer to the Ochako and Izuku they knew in their futures as Uravity and Analyst, their hero callsigns from those futures.
• Out-of-Character Alert: In his first appearance, Katsuki Bakugou notices that something seems to have happened to Izuku as he suddenly seems to have developed a backbone and refuses to take any crap from Katsuki, making the future Great Explosion Murder God feel as though he's fallen behind again.
• Plot-Triggering Death: Both Ochako and Izuku die in their timelines during the first chapter, which causes the Second User's Quirk to send them back in time.
• Point of Divergence: Both Ochako's timeline and the new timeline have differed greatly from canon.
  • In Ochako's timeline:
    • She met All Might when a S-Rank villain called Blastwave attacked her city and she rushed into a crumbling building to save a child. All Might, inspired by her heroic spirit, chose her to be his successsor.
    • All for One's successor was a girl named Homura Shigaraki (heavily implied to be Hana Shimura), whose Quirk allowed her to increase the speed of anything she touches.
    • Inasa Yoarashi was a Class 1-A student.
    • Since he never ran into All Might, Izuku decided to follow Eraserhead's example and attempt to transfer to the Hero Course during the Sports Festival. He manages to score eighth place before being defeated by Shoto. Izuku joined class 1-A after Sato dropped out following the training camp attack.
    • Tokoyami was kidnapped by the League during the Training Camp attack instead of Bakugo. While her classmates planned a rescue mission, Ochako opted to believe the Pros and did not join.
    • Things fell apart once All for One arrived. All Might had split his time between fighting the villain and saving the students. All Might managed to kill All for One at the cost of his own life.
    • The loss of both the Symbol of Peace and the Symbol of Evil in a single night led to a villain uprising worse than the one in canon and caused Ochako to develop serious trust issues.
    • Chizome Akaguro's carrer was an inversion of his main timeline one: He started off as Hero Killer Stain, except, he killed heroes in a metaphorical way, by airing their dirty laundry an exposing their corruption. After All Might's death in Kamino, he became the vigilante Stendhal.
  • In the new timeline:
    • Something allowed Kaina Tsutsumi to escape getting sent to Tartarus, seeing her instead become a vigilante.
    • Due to Himiko and Shizu making the Hero Course, Minoru and Sero are Demoted to Extra, most likely having applied to other hero schools.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Effectively what causes the end of both our heroes. Though both protagonists are from different timelines, they both suffer the same fate.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Aizawa gives a particularly scathing one to the Aldera Middle School principal after he discovers that Bakugou's school records were falsified to make it seem like Izuku was always the bad guy in his confrontations with Bakugou, while Bakugou's records were spotless, likely due to Izuku being Quirkless and Bakugou possessing a powerful Quirk.
• Related in the Adaptation: Izuku is revealed to be Nana Shimura's grandson on his mother's side, which ironically also makes him and Tomura Shigaraki cousins.
• The Rest Shall Pass: Rappa openly invites the heroes raiding the Shie Hassaikai to do this so that he can let them save Eri without losing face. Gran Torino fights him while the rest push on.
• Transplant:
  • Emily Song, from Aliandris' A Different Course appears during the trip to I-Island. And much like in that fic, she has a Ship Tease with Himiko.
  • Hifumi Toga, Himiko's younger sister also appears before the raid.
• Secret-Keeper: As of chapter 31, the following people know about One for All and that Izuku and Ochako came from the future, as well from different timelines: Nezu, Eraserhead, Midnight, Tsukauchi, David and Melissa, Ochako's parents, Inko, Himiko and Ryukyu.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The entire goal of Midoriya and Uraraka is to correct the mistakes they both made in their respective timelines with the goals of saving the current one.
• Slice of Life: Most of the chapters between major events focus on the homelife of the Midoriya family and their newest member, Himiko.
• Shout-Out: With Aika and Emika being expies of Hibiki Tachibana and Miku Kohinata, their battle in the Sports Festival is a reenactment of Hibiki and Miku's battle in G.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • The raid on the Shie Hassaikai happens before Overhaul can put the Boss in a coma, and just in time, as the police found equipment to sustain a comatose patient in one the hideout's rooms.
  • While Hana Shimura was almost instantly killed by her brother when he touched her with his whole hand, this timeline's Hana was able to use her Quirk to put herself in a state of suspended animation. All for One would later rename her Homura Shigaraki.
• Spiritual Antithesis: To New Game Plus (2022). Both are fics that revolve around Time Travel and the concept of The Multiverse, with Izuku being sent back in time, except in Back to the Beginning he sent is sent months before canon events, with an alternate Ochako alongside him instead of alone to the events of the first chapter. In both he uses his future knowledge to attempt to fix what went wrong, such as saving Eri and preventing Himiko's Start of Darkness, however in NGP, Izuku becomes a Unwitting Instigator of Doom, the changes that he brings causes the timeline to get even darker, and sometimes bloodier, than the original one, establising the tone that the future is set in stone and no one can change it, that caused many readers to drop the story. In contrast, BttB has a clear theme that the future can be changed, and while not all of those changes are for the better, it is still shaping up for a far more optimistic setting than in canon.
• Spotting the Thread: After months of investigating Deika City in order to understand its connection with the Meta Liberation Army, Nezu finally discovers one during Toku Hanabata/Trumpet's public speeches, when the Hearts and Minds Party leader makes the liberation Secret Handshake (pointing their right hand upward as a Finger Gun with the thumb extended to their forehead) in front of a crowd of citzens, and most of them repeating the gesture.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Stendhal's campaign to expose false heroes may have worked for a short-run, however, following All Might's death in Kamino, it ended causing the public to completely lose their trust on heroes, which led to rise of vigilantes and villain groups. The PLF in Ochako's world greatly benefitted from his actions.
• Wham Episode: Chapter 62: The heroes manage to capture Tomura Shigaraki at the end of the USJ.
• Wham Line: From Izuku himself, early on: "I'm from the future."
  • From Inko when Toshinori is telling her and the Urarakas about the past torchbearers.
    Toshinori: "Thanks to young Midoriya and young Uraraka, I've been able to piece together information about the other holders. Of course, the one I know the most about is my mentor, Nana Shimura-"
    Inko: gasps and drops glass "M-mom?!"
  • From The Stinger of chapter 39:
    "So that's the infamous hero killer," Kaina Tsutsumi mused to herself as she watched Stain leaping from rooftop to rooftop through a pair of binoculars. "Well then, let's see if you're worth my time."