I know this sounds stupid but I found it pretty cool a lot people see quirk usage as common but vigilantes shows how small quirk usage is besides heros and vigilantes i would love a series or small 40 chapter thing on a normal hs in mha
I know this sounds stupid but I found it pretty cool a lot people see quirk usage as common but vigilantes shows how small quirk usage is besides heros and vigilantes i would love a series or small 40 chapter thing on a normal hs in mha
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It honestly strikes me as odd that Quirk use isn’t that common in everyday life aside from heroics, vigilantism or villainy, even with the canonical explanation of Quirk regulation/registration. Even members of emergency services don’t really use their Quirks. It’s strange because in other settings like the Legend of Korra where magic/superpowers are relatively commonplace, you do see them be used for mundane purposes, such as lightningbenders substituting for coal-fire power in providing Republic City with energy.
Might just be a case for Japan, considering they have a culture ingrained with not standing out and not causing trouble for others.
Absolutely. Horikoshi has always made it a point in the world building of My Hero that people having quirks is a bit of a counter-culture to that belief system of being “ordinary,” by way of quirks being a bit of a metaphor for what makes a person different from others.
I wouldn’t be shocked if quirk usage was way higher in other countries where differences are less shunned. We may never see much of it but I think it’s very possible.
I could see America having a new Amendment that is essentially the Second one, but for Quirks.
Given that All Might could just go there as a teenager, seemingly without needing to establish or register himself there formally, and just kick the shit out of villains (and also how Vigilantes ends) that sounds about right
I would love to see how South American countries responded to quirks.
That’s a really interesting idea, since many South American nations love to celebrate standing out and creating arts and spectacle, especially with vigilantism laws being very loose there it would make sense if quirk usage was more unrestricted. I really wanna see a MHA spinoff in South America now
If I had a cool mundane quirk, like Dekus mom for example, no force on earth could stop me from enjoying it. Need to get my keys? Yonk. Handing me spare change at the register? Yonk. Eating potato chips? You guessed it. Yonk.
A quirk like that could be used in everyday life probably in a way that wouldn't run afoul of the law. Laser eyes on the other hand.
Issue I see with it is that quirks are homogenous for them to facilitate the same direction. Like you’re not gonna have so many water quirk users that will want to be fire fighters. Quirks are still relatively undocumented and underprepared if we want to go over how little the students knew how to maximize their quirks before HS. We get to see people like 1A make it to be as useful as it is but untrained individuals could create serious problems practicing without education and in a workplace endangering people heavily
people barely use their quirks unless they have a license to use their quirk for their job, if that job even allows the use of quirks. Most quirks do not benefit people in normal daily life
It’s different in LoK where you basically have 4 main types of abilities people can have. People vary in strength and training but the way each type of bending works, the limitations of their abilities, and the utility of each ability in performing valuable work are basically the same.
Whereas in MHA, there’s a huge diversity to quirk abilities and their associated drawbacks. You’d have to customize the job to the individual and their own capabilities and limitations. But there’s a couple things about Japanese culture that would oppose this.
First, Japan tightly regulates guns. Certain quirks don’t have much utility outside of combat, or the side effects of the quirk are harmful to others. Thus I’m not surprised that Japan registers and regulates quirks as if any quirk can be used as a weapon.
Second, I’m also thinking about the influence of salaryman culture in Japan, where for many office jobs, employees are basically interchangeable and can be moved around to staff different job roles according to the needs of their company. Designating certain jobs for certain quirk users is incompatible with this philosophy.
I didn’t see Vigilantes but afaik we didn’t get much of a look into everyday U.S. quirk use. I’m thinking that alongside the relative freedom for random citizens to own and use guns, there might be more freedom for the general public to use their quirks. Given the hustle culture present in the U.S., I imagine that a lot of people in the U.S. might take advantage of their quirks to become freelancers and entrepreneurs.
That’s what I was thinking with like a police officer, what happens when a guy has a quirk that’s like “I can restrain people with my mind” but he doesn’t want to go through all the hoops of being a hero and risking his life against city leveling threats and he’d rather be a beat cop that no mild criminal could get away from
i don't think it's actually that odd if you think about it. some are, but not everyone's quirk is suitable to be used in every day life. izuku's dad breathes fire, for example. quirk usage laws aside, what mundane daily uses are you making of that if your job is grocery store manager or computer engineer? if you're an emergency services worker whose quirk grows mushrooms from things, what use is that to you?
yeah some people have quirks that can help them in daily life that they use quietly, like izuku's mom floating things to her. i'd never have to reach for the remote again if i had that power. phone falls off the bed? GET OVER HERE! but the majority of quirks don't seem to help just regular people in everyday life. which is part of why the hero career was born, so they can use them in specific applications
Think about it like this. Your favorite hobby is now your quirk.
Most just aren't that applicable to day to day life. They're something you do on the side for fun, and most people don't practice with it well enough to actually get good enough with it to be useful with it. Like picking up an instrument. Say my quirk is that I can play piano. I started learning when I was a kid and just never really practiced much. Now here I am 30 years later and I'm still really bad and wouldn't want to play it at a christmas party.
Tbh its just a lazy handwave to explain why the world is so similar to ours.
To be fair, quirks are only 100-ish years old, whereas the Avatar world has millennia of bending including a somewhat global „religion“ built around one person provably reincarnating over and over again tied to bending styles.
Like, the Avatar world is built around bending, it’s steeped into every nation, identity, lifestyle, belief system etc…
But I do agree that MHA never made an effort - potentially intentionally so - to integrate quirks in everyday life.
E.g. realistically speaking, I think it would make sense to have quirk related classes/clubs even for non-heroes.
Like how in the real world, sports clubs exist, you could have similar things for related quirks.
Considering UA has a combat orientated entrance exam I'm surprised middle schools like the one Izuku and Bakugo went to didn't have an after school class where they could learn to use quirks for similar hero school entrance exams.
It's just a bit odd, which is why my favourite worldbuilding element in all of MHA was the Meta Liberation Army.
It makes so much sense that people would want to use their superpowers without needing to be heroes.
And I think that this was undercut by how villainous a lot of them were.
It's a totally reasonable belief to have, in fact, I think it should be the default belief for so many people who have quirks that drastically change their lives, including every person who has a mutation quirk, since those are kinda "always" active in a sense, e.g. Tsuyu is always and will always be a frog. She needs to plan her life around that (e.g. she gets more sleepy when it's cold) and we do see with Ochaco, who does the whole Quirk counseling thing due to Toga's quirk and how that shaped her life - which is another missed opportunity.
While Toga killing people with Ochaco's Quirk was crazy and certainly intense, I feel like there was opportunity for extremely interesting reflection on her part that never fully manifested.
She is one of the people who should advocate for free Quirk usage, that is her life after all.
I totally think it's a great idea to write this repressive regulation into the story, I just would have loved for it to be a plot point and to show that this is something that also needs to change, not just the hero rankings.
Yes!!!!! I have such feelings about this. The distribution of physical power among people changed with the advent of quirks, and instead of just continuing to outlaw actions that people take with their bodies, the world, or at least definitively Japan, largely responded by outlawing people's access to their own bodies— fear of the body instead of fear of the crime. This is my HILL TO DIE ON about Vigilantes and I think it does an exceptional job about getting into it.
I love seeing its impact on Koichi who doesn't even know what he can do, and I love that we get a moment where Tensei seems to express feeling sad for fellow movement-type quirk users who don't get to really move (seems to take a lot of joy in movement in a jock way himself)
That intro was a better argument for the Liberation Front than I ever heard in MHA.
Hah! Ty, lmao. In fairness, the PLF missed the mark by a mile by taking a eugenicsy Social Darwinist bent where the physically strong/powerful should get to do whatever they want, instead of finding an approach that cares about protecting everyone but does so without criminalizing the body itself.
yea but it should be obvious
It might be a cultural thing too. Japanese society is often for the collective good rather than individualistic success in the US. The logical thing in a society of quirks is to politely limit the use of your quirks (which have been shown to be potentially highly destructive) so as to not inconvenience other people while in public. Sure a lot of people have quirks like koichi's where they can basically go around the speed of a bicycle, and that's fine to use. But if you have the power to manipulate concrete to your will, then you probably don't want to be using that in a city if you can avoid it because you fuck up the city infrastructure.
In the US, you'd probably have people ranting about their "right to bear arms" while they use their bear arms to deface public property or maim a pedestrian for "looking suspiciously like a villain".
I feel like the city can have laws about not fucking up the infrastructure, rather than laws about not using your quirks in public areas. Sure, that means that if you're an unlicensed Cementoss, the result will be that you basically aren't allowed to use your quirk on property that you don't own. But the lettering of the law counts because you're not just legislating this one specific concrete quirk user, you're legislating everyone.
The people whose quirk use would automatically break the law won't get to use their quirks, but you'll still have outlawed the action (messing with infrastructure in any way), not the concept of quirk use. You may need to reword some laws to include quirk use, but this should probably be covered under the same laws that go "you can't just take a jackhammer to a bridge if you feel like it." That's what I'm getting at.
Quirks will present new things that need to be legislated for, like "don't create illusions that present a public danger" or such. It's just, there's no reason that should be punished as a separate crime category just because it's quirk use. Right now, Koichi even says that enforcement of quirk use laws is up to cop discretion most of the time, but that's how it's practiced, and isn't the letter of the law. The letter of the law could easily be more like "hey don't endanger people" "don't block the roads" "don't cause a panic" "don't mess with infrastructure," rather than "don't use your quirk."
They definitely treat quirks as tools/weapons in their world. That's why they license them and register them to make sure people can track and control reasonable usage. It is assumed they have the standard current real world equivalent laws like Property damage, assault, speeding, etc. so everyday quirk usage would likely fall under that. That being said, just freely using without restrictions in at least public spaces would absolutely be hazardous, especially with kids who don't know how to control theirs yet. So it's just easier to have a blanket limitation on quirks in public and in the workplace/society just for the general safety of everyone (including any would be perpetrators). And it is kind of nice that the police and heroes have some leeway to make judgement calls on use cases. But it still does put a lot of trust in the general public, which sometimes does not make the best decisions or judgement calls (even for themselves)
The problem their society had though was not giving a proper outlet for people to test, use, or learn them otherwise for control purposes outside of the licensing and career pathways. That should probably be covered now with the more modern approach to quirk counseling that the MHA crew are pioneering. Getting kids to understand their abilities and how to handle them effectively and appropriately is a good way to prevent things down the line. I imagine this program could also open up avenues to help make quirk usage more readily available and less stigmatized in some cases.
You have outlined the in-universe argument for the laws that exist. I do disagree with them. Outlawing quirk use, instead of outlawing doing damage/crime, means that people who are not causing harm by using their quirks can get swept up into legal action anyway. Cops can choose who to allow and who to punish even when the person being punished was not causing any harm, or at risk of causing any harm (via negligence/recklessness/etc).
The blanket limitation provides a very legally defensible basis on which cops can discriminate against people, without making anyone any safer.
It disconnects people from their bodies instead of focusing on legislating actions that are taken with those bodies, and that's a pretty drastic measure. Considering part of someone's body a weapon, and then saying they may not use it, is a pretty big deal law to make.
I feel like reckless negligence laws can be drafted to cover a lot of the kind of "quirk going out of control" quirk use that you're worried about, without outlawing quirk use.
Your response is very nuanced, and I think your final paragraph especially has merit. I do still think that there's an argument to be made for not outlawing quirk use, itself, in most settings.
I think it is incredibly wasteful not to use good quirks.
Like, you have a healing quirk, and you need a Hero License in order to be able to use it? What if you just want to be a doctor, not a hero?
Or what if you are a teleporter? A paramedic could save thousands of lives, but they won't be able to do so unless they go to Hero Academia and fight a giant robot...
I'm sure there are non-hero options for professional quirk use, look at Tsukauchi. There must be other licensing options for different professions.
Tsukauchi is expressly not allowed to use his quirk for his job, if he has a quirk. It remains uncomfirmed whether Tsukauchi has a quirk and what it is if he does have one.
Unless you mean Makoto Tsukauchi, in which case #feminismwin for which sibling you're referring to by surname
Not really tbh , in the vigilantes manga there is a scene of a police officer needing to use her quirk to get someone out of an exploding mech and immediately starts talking about her getting reprimanded for using her own quirk even if it's to save someone's life ... Which is nuts imo
A real life example would be like having a cop file paperwork/go through an investigation for why they ha to discharge their firearm. I imagine they have something similar for quirk usage. Also in Ep 2 she was probably going to be reprimanded more for blowing her cover more than anything else.
isn’t it mentioned that ochako would’ve just got a license for work related quirk usage if she weren’t a hero or am i making shit up?
She wanted her hero license to help her family, bit I am not sure if she intended to use her quirk to aid their construction business, or if she just wanted to give them money.
I think so. I guess her parents knew she also liked heros and thought she would be limiting herself is she only got the quirk-construction license.
I mean we have never seen him use his quirk
I am begging them to let Momo print rare earth minerals, microchips, and pharmaceutical compounds. It’s silly that she has to first train to become a hero and develop combat/rescue skills when she could bring so much good to the world by simply sitting in an office with snacks, manufacturing valuable and scarce resources all day.
yes, people barely use their quirks unless they have a license to use their quirk for their job, if that job even allows the use of quirks.
This is partly positive, because it prevents many people from using them for malicious purposes and becoming villains, however the fact that they are little used and taken for granted has led society to not understand what it does to people (see Himiko whose literal bloodthirst was due to her quirk and her parents did not give the slightest weight to this thing)
I would def be the person getting arrested for using a convenience quirk.