Fanfic / Prince Of Heroes

Izuku has always wanted to be a quirkless hero. The online quirkless community, the only place he's ever felt accepted, have always supported him on that. They need him to be a hero for people like them, people who have bad quirks, villainous quirks, or no quirks at all. Being a hero for his people has always been the plan.

Then he gets the chance of a lifetime, to be a hero in the spotlight. Just not the way he wanted.

Now Izuku's future as the first quirkless hero is jeopardy, and with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, his dream is more important than ever. The adults in his life don't think he can do it, but that's never stopped him before. With a legacy on his shoulders and a destiny nipping at his heels, Izuku will have to fight to become the type of hero he wants to be.

Prince Of Heroes is a My Hero Academia fanfiction series created by TheNarator, who is also known for writing Heroics and Other Things That Don't Require Superpowers.

The series currently has six entries:

• Champion Of The Damned And Powerless
• Beacon For The Lost And Astray
• Shelter For The Weak And Weary
• Savior Of The Desperate And Forgotten
• Defender Of The Innocent And Abused
• Paragon Of Truth And Justice

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This series contains the following tropes:

• Abhorrent Admirer: Sir Nighteye is this towards All Might and Izuku both, with him being romantically obsessed with All Might, and desperately trying to get him to abandon Inko and take Mirai as his partner instead. He is similarly obsessed with Izuku, ostensibly wanting to take a parental role in Izuku’s life, but often showing signs of much more…unsavory…interests. All Might, for all that he is forced to rely on Sir Nighteye after driving away all his other friends and allies, is still repulsed by the idea of a romantic relationship with him. Izuku is likewise disgusted with Sir Nighteye’s obsession.
• Abusive Parents:
  • All Might is emotionally and mentally abusive towards Izuku, often ignoring Izuku's own desires in favor of his presupposed "destiny", reaching the point of physical abuse when he forces One For All onto Izuku.
  • Endeavor is a more overtly physical example. Aside from the harsh training he forces on Shouto, he also backhands Natsuo for talking back to him in Shouto's defense and molested Fuyumi.
  • All For One is Izuku’s biological father. Unfortunately, he is every bit as possessive and controlling as All Might, or even more. During their final confrontation, All For One makes it clear that he intends to lock Izuku away, just like he did with his little brother before, with All For One asking Izuku how long he has to keep Izuku in isolation, before Izuku finally starts loving him.
  • Momo’s parents sold her cousin, Kai, to the yakuza, leading him to becoming Overhaul. It’s also implied that they’ve used several other illegal means to amass wealth for themselves, and Momo realizes that the very same could happen to her, if they deem that she is no longer of any use to them.
• Accidental Public Confession: At a ceremony for honoring the PLF for their part in bringing down All For One, as well as granting them full hero licenses, All Might and Sir Nighteye abruptly arrive to confront Izuku and try to force him to admit that he used a Quirk to defeat All For One. In order to facilitate this, they bring along a collaborator, who has the Forced Quirk Activation Quirk. However, because One For All was destroyed in the conflict, there is no Quirk in Izuku to activate. Nezu subsequently concocts a lie that All For One attempted to steal a Quirk from Izuku, which instead stole Izuku’s Quirklessness, leading to the destruction of all of All For One’s Quirks. All of this subsequently provokes All Might into an outburst, publicly revealing his actions to force a Quirk onto Izuku, which amounts to him admitting to committing assault, all in front of a massive crowd of witnesses and on a public broadcast. He and Sir Nighteye are subsequently arrested as a consequence.
• Adapted Out: Like with many other My Hero Academia fanfics, Mineta isn't a part of Class 1-A in this series.
• Adaptational Jerkass:
  • All Might, so much so that it can be seen as Adaptational Villainy. While in canon he's a Big Good loving mentor to Izuku, here he's a quirkist (and possibly sexist) person who physically forced his quirk onto him, seeing his masters legacy as more important than what his son actually wants.
  • Canon Sir Nighteye was already disliked, due to the fact that he blatantly disparaged Izuku and openly stated that his primary reason for accepting Izuku on work study was so that he could essentially browbeat Izuku into giving up One For All to Mirio. In this story, he manages to come off as even worse. Mirai is romantically obsessed with All Might and wants to convince All Might to leave Inko so that they can be together, and accepted Izuku’s request for work study to further this end. To make matters worse still, Sir Nighteye’s behavior towards Izuku himself grows more obsessive, with blatant pedophilic undertones.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Bakugou, even before getting turned into a Noumu, willingly joined the League of Villains just so he could get his 'revenge' on Izuku, blaming him for getting rejected from UA.
  • Fuyumi Todoroki is a villain alongside her brother, going by the name Hoshi.
• Adaptational Relationship Change:
  • Inko is the daughter of Nana, making Izuku her grandson and cousins to Tomura.
  • Izuku and All Might go from loving mentor/mentee to resentful of each other, with Izuku hating All Might for treating him as a successor over his own person and All Might not understanding why Izuku won't use One For All.
  • In exchange, Izuku and Stain end up in a mentor-mentee relationship after Stain is able to escape from the police with Izuku's help.
  • Neito ends up in 1-A and becomes friendly with all of them, particularly Izuku and Hitoshi.
  • Momo is cousins with Overhaul.
  • The Dekusquad in this fic becomes Izuku, Momo, Shouto, Hitoshi, and Neito.
  • In canon, Itsuka Kendo is the peacemaker, and constantly working to prevent Neito from blowing 1-B’s rivalry with 1-A out of proportion. In this series, she is openly antagonistic, due to resenting 1-A for working together to improve their standing in the Sports Festival, with Neito pointing out that 1-B could have done the same, but didn’t seem to think of it. As a result, she holds a great deal of resentment towards the other class.
• Adaptational Superpower Change:
  • Unlike in canon where he has an unnamed ice quirk, here Natsuo is quirkless, with it being theorized that having parents with such opposing quirk factors increased the likelihood of it due to cancelling each other out.
  • Downplayed by Fuyumi, who still has an ice quirk but it's implied to be much stronger than her canonical one and came with secondary traits that made her resistant to heat but vulnerable to cold—effectively the exact opposite of her twin, Touya's, quirk. Which is why she is presumed dead alongside Touya here.
• Adaptational Wimp: The Meta Liberation Army go from the nation spanning conspiracy with over a hundred-thousand members that they are in canon to a group of Quirkist trolls who greatly exaggerate their power and influence. In particular, the number of members that Re-Destro cites in canon is revealed to be the number of copies of Destro’s reprinted manifesto they’ve sold. While they still manage to capture Giran, the PLF has no trouble getting him back from Deika City, as it’s revealed that the city is mostly unoccupied, Re-Destro even going so far as to say that he couldn’t even pay people to live there.
• Adults Are Useless: Let's just says it's pretty telling when Izuku trusts an S-Rank serial killer more than any of the other adults in his life.
  • Finally averted in Defender of the Innocent and Abused, when Izuku tells Aizawa all about One For All and All Might forcing it on him. Aizawa immediately escalates the matter to Nezu, who is not happy to hear the truth about what All Might has done, and plans to take care of the problem himself.
• Age Lift: Himiko is actually a woman in her early 20s rather than a teenage girl.
• Big Damn Heroes: In an effort to save countless people from the HPSC’s new draconian attempt to enforce martial law on Tokyo, Izuku and his fellow hero students, along with the vigilantes of the PLF and a few other allies, conduct a massive evacuation of the city’s homeless population, along with anyone else who might have been caught outside, when the law went into effect. In response, a police convoy drives up to the refugee camp, where the officer in charge attempts to order the arrest of everyone there, and even goes so far as to try and shoot Izuku for stopping him. However, Hawks arrives, along with several other heroes, all of them taking a stand alongside Izuku and his friends to put a stop to this.
• Bilingual Backfire: Izuku and his friends' habit of using JSL to talk amongst themselves nearly proves disastrous when it turns out Hawks also understands JSL. The only reason it doesn't completely blow their secrets wide open to the HPSC is because the reveal of Endeavor's crimes, in particular that he's a child abuser, causes Hawks to switch loyalties for real.
• Briar Patching: Izuku ultimately defeats All For One…by convincing All For One to take One For All, which causes the two Quirks to destroy one another, killing All For One in the process.
• Conflict Killer: The brewing confrontation between Izuku and his friends against the forces loyal to the Commission is completely derailed by the Tartarus prison break, forcing everyone to forget the Commission’s attempt to enforce martial law, and instead focus on taking down the newly escaped criminals, with All For One moving to destroy the Commission himself.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The Joint Training arc ends in a string of almost total victories for 1-A, who all but completely crush 1-B in each match. The only major wrinkle is Izuku being incited into unwittingly using Blackwhip during his training match, when Pony and Reiko steal his weapons.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set: Izuku’s band of vigilantes announce themselves in this fashion, interrupting the Hero Billboard Charts, right as Endeavor is about to deliver his speech as the new Number One Hero, completely stealing his thunder by playing footage showing their capture of Overhaul and announcing their intention to supplant heroes, completely derailing the event.
• Dramatic Irony: Gran Torino, under the belief that Izuku agreed to accept All Might's quirk but simply got cold feet/buyer's remorse, reassures All Might about the situation by telling him it's not like he did the exact thing Izuku hates him for doing.
  Gran Torino: "He wouldn’t have spent ten months training to receive One for All if he didn’t really want it. Even if he got cold feet at the last minute, you did the right thing to give him a push. It’s not like you held him down or anything, right?”
  • As the PLF gain more and more notoriety, Aizawa grows more worried about Izuku becoming disillusioned with heroes and falling under the vigilante organization’s influence…blissfully unaware that Izuku is the actual mastermind behind their activities.
• Gaslighting: The PLF use this to great effect on Endeavor during the work study period. When Endeavor is at home, they keep him up at night by making strange sounds in and around the house, forcing him to constantly get up and look for a source. Meanwhile, they subtly rearrange his appliances in the kitchen, as well as various pieces of furniture around his house in order to trick his muscle memory, which causes Endeavor to stub his toe several times. They even rearrange the contents of his drawers in his bedroom, all to further knock him off his game so he’s less mentally prepared for the Humiliation Conga they’ve engineered for him at work.
• Guile Hero: Izuku is working on both sides of the law as both a hero student and a vigilante. In particular, as the vigilante, Beacon, he helps orchestrate the rise of the PLF, which highlights and targets the corruption at the heart of the current hero system, successfully orchestrating several operations that undermine the authority of the corrupt heroes and the Commission that supports them…all while maintaining his identity as a regular Hero Course student.
• Hates Their Parent: Izuku hates All Might to his core, not only for being dismissive of Izuku's goals, but for forcing One For All onto him. He also hates All for One, who claims to be his biological father.
• Heel–Face Turn: Tomura does one after he finds out that All for One planned to possess his body, deciding to join Izuku's vigilante group, along with the rest of the League.
• Heel Realization: Stain comes to one after a combination of being called out by Izuku and learning a "mugger" he nearly killed was actually a kid staging the attacks to try to attract a hero to patrol her unsafe neighborhood. It's enough to make him accept that he needs to not just stop killing but change tactics entirely.
• Humiliation Conga: Izuku and the PLF engineer one for Endeavor, first by having him deal with disasters at his agency, causing constant malfunctions with the water and climate control. Then they wear him down with psychological warfare tactics at home to keep him off his game, before engineering a situation where he’s tricked into assaulting one of his employees at work, which is then secretly filmed, then spread online, prompting him to fire his office staff, which prompts Burnin to try and stage an intervention with him, only for him to snap and call her a “whore”, which prompts her and the rest of his sidekicks to quit. And through all of it, the press is dogging him incessantly, which only gets worse when evidence of his abusive actions is released online as well. All of this culminates with him being goaded into assaulting a police officer, prompting the officer’s partner to try and arrest him, at which point, Endeavor can only flee.
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • Izuku still acquires One For All.
  • Izuku convinces Shouto to use his fire during the Sports Festival.
  • Izuku breaks a finger using One For All (albeit without his consent) to break out of Hitoshi's brainwashing and pushes him out of the ring.
  • Izuku ends up with Gran Torino as his internship and fights Stain during the Hosu incident.
  • All Might defeats All for One at Kamino Ward and his true form is revealed to the world.
  • Tomura still ends up leading an organization called the PLF. However, in this case, it’s a vigilante organization called the People’s Liberation Front, rather than the Paranormal Liberation Front.
• Internal Reveal: In Defender of the Innocent and Abused, Izuku finally comes clean to Aizawa about what All Might has done to him, leading Aizawa to take action.
• Invisible Streaker: Hagakure, as per canon. Up until Izuku figures out that she can bend light around her clothes too, much to her delight.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: After kidnapping Izuku and placing him in the vault, All for One reveals that he is actually Izuku's biological father and claiming that All Might kidnapped Izuku.
• Mundane Utility: Shinsou's Quirk, Brainwashing, turns out to be surprisingly useful for helping people take power naps.
• Necromancy: Izuku analyzes that Pixie-Bob's Quirk doesn't actually manipulate earth, but rather reintroduces life into the dead biological matter within earth.
• "Not So Different" Remark:
  • All Might, like his arch-enemy, forced a quirk on his only living family member as a twisted gift and to try to force him to submit to his control. Upon hearing All Might list off All For One's crimes, Izuku is quick to point out how familiar that sounds.
  • During the mall encounter with Tomura, Shouto notes the similarities between Endeavour and All for One in how they isolate and abuse their protegees.
• Older Than They Look: As it turns out, Himiko is actually in her early 20s (her middle school graduation was almost seven years ago) and pretended she was younger so that people would be nicer to her.
• Point of Divergence:
  • Due to not scoring any Rescue points, Katsuki is barred from UA and ends up as a Nomu for the League.
  • Izuku is able to defeat Shouto and Hitoshi at the sports festival, ending up the winner, albeit not entirely quirkless.
  • Izuku allows Stain to escape from the heroes and the police and later seeks him out as a mentor.
  • Through manipulating Pixie-Bob's Quirk, Izuku is able to get Class 1-A to the summer campgrounds in 30 minutes.
  • Stain hears about the League's plan to attack U.A.'s camp and helps Izuku defeat Muscular.
  • Izuku is the main target of the Vanguard Action Squad at the camp and he and Shouto end up being taken by the League.
  • Hitoshi and Neito are the ones who come up with the plan to rescue Izuku and, besides Yayorouzu (who they need for her tracker) and Todoroki (who was kicked out of the League's base earlier by his siblings), are the only ones to go on the mission due to not trusting All Might or the other heroes.
  • During the Kamino fight, Stain is able to split the League in half, with Spinner, Himiko, and the Todoroki siblings joining him.
  • Mirio has not become apprenticed to Sir Nighteye and thus still has issues using his Quirk.
  • Momo ends up doing a work study with Fatgum instead of Kirishima.
  • Izuku and Mirio are able to get Eri away from Overhaul when she runs into the two of them.
  • Izuku, Stain, and their vigilante group are able to capture Overhaul before the Hero raid and convince Tomura along with his league to join Izuku's side.
• Poor Communication Kills: in Defender of the Innocent and Abused, the vestiges of One For All reveal that, not only are they in Izuku’s corner, but they’re so appalled at what All Might did that they’ve banished his vestige from the Quirk completely. Unfortunately, their efforts to communicate this are hampered by the fact that Izuku’s refusal to use One For All have left them with very little options for making contact, which results in the Yoichi trying to reach out to Izuku in his sleep…which inadvertently activates One For All. Daigoro’s attempt results in an unwanted activation of Blackwhip, which nearly outs him as having a Quirk to the rest of his classmates during the joint training match with 1-B. On top of all that, their initial attempts at talking to Izuku come off as them urging him to use One For All in manner similar to All Might, which prompts Izuku to initially reject them, until he is able to enter the vestige realm with Hitoshi’s help to finally clear the air between them.
• Post-Support Regret:
  • After learning about what Endeavor did to his children, Hawks is distraught about his previous idolization of the fallen hero, prompting him to do everything in his power to assist and protect the twins and aid the PLF.
  • When the truth about what Toshinori did to Izuku finally comes out, Gran Torino devlops this as well, deeply regretting his part, however unwitting, in aiding Toshinori’s attempts to force Izuku to use One For All.
• Rage Breaking Point: Izuku lets Gran Torino have it when he finds out that All Might (and Nedzu, although Izuku doesn't know he was involved) made it seem like Izuku had no offers for internships so that he would end up with Gran Torino all to force Izuku to start using One For All.
• Rage Quit: After the newly formed People’s Liberation Front makes their debut by interrupting the Hero Billboard Chart, right as Endeavor was about to deliver his speech, Endeavor’s response is to drop the microphone and storm off without saying a word.
• Relationship Upgrade:
  • Neito/Hitoshi in the final chapter of Shelter For The Weak And Weary
  • Izuku/Shouto in the final chapter of Savior Of The Desperate And Forgotten
• Screw Destiny: Izuku is able to move away from Nighteye's predictions by coming to this realization:
  The future cannot be changed... unless I change it.
• Secret Test of Character: The UA entrance exam. In addition to awarding Rescue Points for helping other examinees that are in trouble, participants such as Bakugou who earn no Rescue Points by the end of the exam are disqualified, on the logic that anyone who can go through an entire dangerous scenario without once feeling the urge to help someone probably isn't very heroic.
• Stay in the Kitchen: All Might has this mindset with Inko, preferring her to stay home as his "cute little housewife" rather than pursuing her own career.
• Stern Teacher: Aizawa. Unfortunately, he's used to his top students being kids with strong quirks who have been coddled and praised by their past teachers, so he's unprepared for a class in which his top students are kids with marginalized Quirks or no Quirk at all, who are used to being bullied by bigoted teachers and classmates and quickly misidentify his Brutal Honesty as more of the same. Even when he realizes his mistake, his attempts to course correct are hobbled by All Might going behind his back and his own inability to communicated to the students he's already alienated that he believes in them.
• Useless Bystander Parent: Inko doesn't really do much to protect Izuku beyond vague encouragement and trying to encourage her husband to give him space. Though as Izuku points out in her defense, there isn't much she can do against All Might given she needs his protection from her mother's enemies and would never win a custody battle against the Symbol of Peace. After the Final Exam, where All Might nearly killed Izuku, Inko starts to regain her backbone and keep All Might in line when they're at home.
• Wham Episode: Defender of the Innocent and Abused is where the series starts to both go off the canon rails and shake up the internal status quo.
  • In particular, Chapter 9. It sees Nezu taking action against All Might for what he’s done to Izuku. First, he tricks All Might into signing ownership of several properties, including his own agency, over to Izuku and Inko…before terminating his employment and revealing that he now knows exactly what happened between All Might and Izuku, when the former forced One For All on the latter. All Might rushes home in an attempt to make Inko pull Izuku from UA (since Nezu used a paternity test to disprove All Might’s claim to being Izuku’s father), only to find that Inko and Rei have been evacuated by Aizawa. He turns to Gran Torino, and then Tsukauchi, both of whom wind up finding out the depraved depths Toshinori has sunk to, which prompts them to abandon him too. Left with no one else to turn to, Toshinori can only call upon Sir Nighteye for help.
  • Then, Chapter 20, which starts off like a fluffy filler episode, only for an unknown figure approach Tomura and try to lure him back into the fold, then All Might goes on TV publicly naming Inko and Izuku as his wife and son and accusing Nezu and UA of kidnapping them from him, keeping them against their will, and suppressing Izuku's Quirk.
  • Paragon Of Truth And Justice has several of these in succession.
    • First, Izuku and his friends watch a newscast revealing that the remnants of the MLA (instigated by Tomura) led an unsuccessful attack on the HPSC, prompting the Commission President to declare martial law across Tokyo, promising to arrest anyone still out on the street, when the law goes into effect, even though that would include untold hundreds, if not thousands, of homeless people and otherwise innocent people who aren’t able to make it indoors in time.
    • Second, after Izuku has finished spearheading the effort to evacuate all the civilians who would have otherwise been caught up by the HPSC’s draconian measure, with the heroes intervening to stop the police from attempting to arrest everyone anyway, it is revealed that there has been a massive prison break at Tartarus, releasing dozens of horrifically dangerous criminals throughout the city.
    • And finally, the next chapter reveals that All For One himself has attacked the HPSC headquarters, and makes a public broadcast, announcing that Izuku is his son to the world, and demanding that Izuku come and join him.
• Wham Line: As Momo considers the picture of Chisaki/Overhaul she was shown, a thought comes into her mind:
  Where have I seen him before?