Rewriting Heroes and Villains
TFans have always had to build their own spaces when the ones they relied on failed them (Fiesler, 2018). In my last post, I talked about how AO3 was created because previous sites kept deleting, censoring, and judging fanworks. The basic idea was that if fans don’t control the space, they can’t control what happens to the things they make in it. Of course, fanworks have been transforming source material since long before AO3, the site just gave them a stable place to keep doing what they’d always done. Beyond that, the platform design made it easier for readers to connect otherwise unrelated fics through tagged pairings, tropes, themes, etc (Silberstein-Bamford, 2024). My Hero Academia is a good example of how this plays out. The fandom is loud, borderline obnoxious at times, and full of competing interpretations ranging from thoughtful to downright unhinged. The source material itself is fairly easy to pull apart. The world is built around a professional super hero system, where people with strong “quirks” or powers become professional heroes who are supposed to keep society safe from “villains” (Horikoshi, 2024).
The main character, Izuku Midoriya, starts off with no quirk at all, but inherits one alongside a massive legacy from the number 1 hero All Might and enters UA High School to train as a hero. The superpowers in this world provide an interesting allegory for real life marginalization, where someone's quirk status determines their place in society. Mutation quirks are ostracized for their appearances, dangerous quirks are labeled villainous, some individuals are victims of human trafficking for their quirks, and the quirkless don’t belong at all (Horikoshi, 2024). It’s a very interesting setup and makes a lot of space for fans to analyze and reinterpret what’s happening. AO3’s design makes those interpretations easy to track. Tags and categories let readers navigate the specific issues a story addresses, and the “inspired by” field shows exactly which works influenced which, making it easy to see when a story is building off someone else’s (Silberstein-Bamford, 2024).
CBecause of this, you end up with multiple, overlapping readings of the same material. Some writers focus on institutional critique, others on character psychology, some on interpersonal relationships or ethical dilemmas. For Izuku in particular, many interpretations cluster around his lack of a quirk, his relationship with hero society, and what solutions in face of systemic issues. AO3 turns these isolated fan ideas into visible, traceable patterns—basically, communities forming around shared ways of reading the story. Fan scholar Kristina Busse refers to this as an example of an “interpretive community” (Busse, 2017).
The lineage of fanfictions I will discuss today, starting with (How To) Forgive and Forget (HTFAF) and continuing through Tea in a bar and Lost and Found, show how interpretive communities work in fandom and what they have to say. In this example, the community's interpretation is focused on the systemic failings of hero society in BNHA canon, highlighting issues like chronic pain, quirk abuse, and institutional neglect as central to the protagonist's trauma. The fics all agree that established institutions, like UA High School and the Hero Public Safety Commission (HPSC), are deeply flawed and corrupt. The first work, How to forgive and forget by legal kidnapping, is a foundational story that created the pillars of this community—specifically Izuku Midoriya's rejection of the hero system and his discovery of emotional safety and companionship with the League of Villains (LOV). The following two fics explicitly draw inspiration from HTFAF, and expand upon this shared reading. All three stories agree on Izuku’s burnout, trauma, and the system's failure, but where they disagree is on the solution. (How To) Forgive and Forget establishes the foundational idea of total systemic corruption in the BNHA world, leading to Izuku’s choice of radical rejection and complete overhaul. His response involves physically aligning with BNHA’s canon antagonists, the League of Villains (LOV) and legally challenging the system by filing a massive lawsuit against UA High School for endangering students. The hero and villain roles are almost swapped in this story, with “professional heroes” framed as upholders of injustice and villains the marginalized victims. In this way, HTFAF fights back against the source text's structure where good heroes defeat sympathetic but still antagonistic villains.
