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Midoriya Izuku, beyond his admiration of pro heroes in general, had always thought that Midnight-sensei was a great teacher; she was honest, sunny, and beneath the kinky exterior she wore like a second skin, her students would find that she was above all kind and compassionate.
However, he and the rest of her students had also quickly found out that classes with Midnight had one consistent feature; someone, at some point, was going to get flustered and left a red-faced blushing mess.
Perhaps it was a ribald joke she would make (though never at someone’s expense).
Perhaps it was the way she would wink when she thanked a student for answering a question.
Or maybe, like today, it would be when she pulled up his old fanfiction archive account in the middle of class and started the lecture.
The R-18 Heroine Midnight’s position at UA was, formally, as an art history and homeroom teacher, but along with the plus ultra paycheck as a teacher, came plus ultra extra classes to teach. This required both proverbial and literal hats to wear.
Among her other roles at UA, one of those was to act as a public relations consultant for the students in the Hero, Support or Business tracks, and in the case of the Hero course kids, that meant that they would have to learn about fanfiction .
This was a side of heroism that was, frankly, hidden in plain sight and on several different forums on the internet; lots of people didn’t seem to realize that it wasn’t just officially licensed merch-peddlers that made posters and figurines of their favorite heroes.
Some people had access to really big printers, high resolution photos, and photoshop.
Some people could shape plastic into gorgeous statues.
Or, in the case of fanfiction writers, wrote stories about them.
It could also be hero fans.
Hero fans like Midoriya Izuku.
= = = = =
Midnight started the class by turning on the projector behind her, and hitting the button built into one of the studs on her flogger’s handle.
The button built into the stud activated the microcontroller built into the flogger, which in turn triggered a bluetooth wireless transceiver that sent a signal to the receiver on her desktop, which had been plugged into a bodged-together mouse emulator made by a second-year support course student, into the USB 5.4 port.
In the end, the entire rigmarole simulated a mouse’s left click, exactly as if she had reached over and pressed a different button on the mouse sitting less than two feet away, advancing the powerpoint from a blank black screen to the first frame of her slideshow.
Because Midnight was kind of extra like that.
“Alright, darlings, who can tell me what all four of these screenshots have in common?” she asked, waving the flogger towards the four pictures behind her.
The first was a wall of text, the second a photo of a custom-built statuette of the pro hero Hawks. The third looked like a crayon drawing of All Might, and last was a screenshot taken from a video of a young man with a guitar in his hands, captured in the middle of rocking his heart out in front of a giant poster of Ryukyu.
It took a moment for Izuku to put together the common thread, and he was almost sure that he would be the first in his class to do so, if only because he’d seen them all before; that was BasaltGestalt’s custom Hawks figurine that he had painstakingly sculpted and painted.
His gaze flicked over to the third picture, which he soon realized was a drawing from a recent HeroFansCentral forum post of a father showing off what was allegedly his son’s first fanart.
The writing he didn’t quite recognize, but he would bet his lunch ticket that it was some kind of fanfiction or hero article.
Lastly, the Ryukyu singer was BallaDan, a well-known HeroTube singer who would theme his song covers after certain heroes. In this case, he was performing Dragon’s Heart.
He knew that answering too quickly would give him away, though, so he simply stared at his notebook and started scribbling down notes.
“Is this about hero merchandise?” was the first guess fielded; Tsuyu with a finger on her chin, tapping thoughtfully. “No, it doesn’t seem right, kero; that drawing looks like it was done by a child.”
“Or just a really bad artist,” cackled Kaminari, who turned to high five Kirishima but was stonewalled by a ‘bro, not manly’ and a shake of a head.
“The writing in the first screenshot is a bit hard to make out. Midnight-sensei, could we get a larger picture of that?” Satou asked with a hand raised.
“Certainly, hon!” Midnight advanced the slideshow with a click of her flogger, showing the picture but blown up to full screen size, so that everyone could read it.
It was narrative fanfiction, written in simple light novel style, and once he had read the first increasingly familiar sentences about All Might considering expanding the Mighty Agency and hiring a new sidekick, Izuku stiffened in his seat.
That meant that the picture was the first chapter of ‘The Mighty and the Mouse’, a hero team fanfiction around the premise of “what if All Might had recruited Nezu as a sidekick”, and the chaos of pairing such a strong hero with a guile one.
Posted by MightyBoy2927.
His FanArchive account.
Midnight-sensei, please no…
He had not just read that fanfiction snippet.
He had written it some three years ago.
“Midoriya, you’re the hero nerd,” prompted Sero, turning around to smile at Izuku. “What’s your guess?”
Izuku slowly sunk into his seat, and was glad there were no broad-spectrum mind readers registered in this part of Musutafu; all they would have been able to hear was one, long, agonized scream .
= = = = =
Midoriya sank deeper into his seat as he found the majority of the eyes in class 1-A drawn to him, their curiosity piqued as Midnight smiled and peered over the top of Tokoyami’s head to see him.
“Well, Midoriya? Might you have the answer?”
Izuku hesitated, glancing around as if he was trying to find an escape route. Since he’d have to bowl over Ochaco to get to the window, he decided to accept his doom. “That’s… uh. They’re all fanart, Midnight-sensei.”
“And just what is fanart, Midoriya-kun? You’re on the right track so far!”
“Fanart is created by fans making their own drawings... uh, stories... songs, and - um - co-collectables. So they make unofficial merchandise or videos, for example.”
“Excellent answer!” Midnight praised, and clicked through the next three slides, which showed a similarly enlarged picture of their respective screenshots. “As I’ve said before, humans create art out of a need to express , and for some people the way they choose to express their gratitude for a hero is in making art.”
Or their dislike. Izuku closed his eyes, once again purging his brain of the memory of all the All Might bashers he had come across over the years.
“Or their hate! Exactly right again, Midoriya.”
Oh. He had said that out loud again, hadn’t he?
“While the majority of fan creations tend towards celebrating the heroes and heroines that they feature, there’s also a subset of them showing heroes with a less than optimistic outlook.”
She clicked to the next slide again, showing a… less than flattering picture of herself. Even censored, it was hard to leave anything to the imagination as more than a few of Izuku’s classmates sputtered and averted their eyes. Iida looked like he was going to burst a blood vessel while snap went the pencil in Uraraka’s hand as she locked up rigid in her seat.
With a loud thud, Mineta fell from his seat and hit the floor, unconscious and frothing at the mouth.
Nobody moved to help him.
“As you can see, these tend to rely on exaggeration and some… artistic license,” Midnight continued, also electing to move on with the lesson.
“So, the first form of fan work we are going to cover for the rest of this lesson is fanfiction; most of it involves text, but often that’s augmented with graphical fan art much like light novels use pictures for illustrative purposes, or even full on comics…”
She clicked to the next slide, much to the class’ relief, and on it were a large number of fanfiction sites that Izuku was very familiar with.
Oh boy. This was going to be a long lesson.
= = = = =
Midnight sensei was thorough, she was well-versed in the subject… and she seemed to be Izuku’s biggest fan.
Well, she was a fan of MightyBoy2927; she brought up several of his other works.
A few about heroes doing hero things… one about a quirkless hero being taken on as All Might’s newest intern… several power fantasies about various people and heroes being thrown into pre-quirk times…
Izuku wished he could trade his quirk with Pixie-Bob’s; that way the earth could swallow him up and he could make his escape.
It wasn’t until she brought up one more of his fics that he realized something in the top right corner of these screenshots; a familiar name.
A fellow writer and frequent commenter in his fics.
A user with a long string of shipping fics that, now that he thought about it, was oddly accurate for the private lives of the various UA teachers involved.
One that often signed off with ‘I’m going to sleep, see you tomorrow!’, which led to her current screen name of Neru Ashita…
And now he knew that Midnight-sensei’s real name was Kayama Nemuri, with the same root word as Neru’s first name…
… what was that wisdom from that one writer who kept doing military AUs? When in doubt… attack?
Izuku stuck his hand up, and prayed that he was guessing right.
“So, Midnight-sensei, I was just looking around at some writers as well… about this user… NeruAshita? She writes a lot about the teachers at UA. Especially about you, uh, and other teacher… what do you feel about this author’s work?”
And thus Izuku was enlightened.
Because the moment when Midnight-sensei froze up?
When she turned, and her expression when she looked at him like he had just leaned forward and bitten off Kacchan's head in front of her?
That must be the feeling she was addicted to when she ran these classes.