Me In The. Me In. The. Uhm.

spinaraki girls save mha pleasepleasple

The trifecta of “this looks sick as fuck, but I’m a little worried about you, sweetie”

I tried to make it funny but can you feel the scream from the bottom of my Mariana trench soul?

Disclaimer 1: I haven't read the manga since about summer, 2020, but this is the impression I got from all the spoilers that, well... flooded my dashboards. I also felt physically ill about the thing in the middle panel and felt it all over again while drawing it ngl.

Disclaimer 2: Hawks is both drowning Deku and Dabi, but with an added layer of "why are you even here" bc has he ever actually... DONE anything to prove his character development (apart from not fighting Toga) that no one else could have done, or was it all say, no show?

(ps I know these don't apply to class 1A for the most part, instead it's about... basically everybody else)

Part 2 of the response to this ask:

Part 1 was about where I think Geten’s story is going, and if I think it’s likely that Dabi will kill him; it dealt mainly with how those characters are set up in canon. Part 2 is far more about the fandom, and the assumptions people make that lead them to theories like the one above--specifically, the assumption that the League was always planning on bailing on the PLF. Hit the jump below with me and I'll go over why I think the common arguments for that are misguided at best, and willfully misreading the text at worst.

WARNING: Contains some generalizations about parts of the fandom that I have mostly taken steps to avoid seeing on my dash, so some of my characterizations may be out of date. I’ve tried to desalinate this post as much as possible, but as an unapologetic fan of the MLA and of Spinner (who I do not bring up incidentally), this is a topic I feel particularly strongly about. Apologies, but I Have Seen Things.

DISCLAIMER: I like Geten better than Dabi. I don't think he's better developed; I don't think he's a better character--I just like him better. This is largely down to the fact that I find the MLA fascinating from a worldbuilding perspective and its members compelling personally, whereas I’m less interested in Dabi personally than I am the Todoroki Drama on the whole, and have been tired of Fanon Dabi for approximately 83 years. I’ll also be the first to admit that my take on Dabi is pretty mercenary--hardly the irredeemable psychopath the Hero Stans on Twitter see, but nothing close to Secretly Soft Big Brother Touya, either. If that’s not your bag, you may want to skip this one.

So, here's a bullet point list of the reasons I have personally seen on why the League was always planning to turn on the MLA:

Dabi and Toga mention "getting started early," and Shigaraki mentions a plan, suggesting that the League had a plan in place independent of the one they arranged as the PLF.

Shigaraki says he won't forgive the Liberation Army for messing with peoples' feelings, so he would never really mean it when he forges an alliance with them.

The MLA is quirk supremacist, like Endeavor, so Dabi would never work with them.

Dabi is just using Skeptic against Skeptic's will; it’s not a willing partnership.

Mr. Compress rejects the PLF moniker for Shigaraki, ergo Mr. Compress didn’t genuinely associate Shigaraki and the League with the PLF.

Toga hated Curious, so she wouldn't want to work with the MLA either.

Twice would never forgive them for what they did to Giran.

[Error: argument about Spinner's opinion on the PLF not found.]

So, let's go over those, shall we? Note that a lot of what I'm going to lay out below isn't conclusive. What I want to establish is simply that the canonical evidence isn't conclusive, certainly not as much so as the people who support this view espouse.

|| Dabi and Toga mention "getting started early," and Shigaraki mentions a plan, suggesting that the League had a plan in place independent of the one they arranged as the PLF.

In responses to my recent Overhaul post, I defended Viz’s official translation as an accurate rendering of the dialogue in question. In general, I feel like Caleb Cook is pretty reliable in his translations, if sometimes kind of stiff or dry in localization. However, there are times he makes assumptions about lines--as indeed a translator for a currently-running series will sometimes have to--and sometimes, those assumptions don’t pan out. This is one of those times.

Dabi's line, "Shall we get started early?" is based on an assumption Cook made about a line that doesn't have an actual subject. In the original dialogue--Hayame ni hajimaru ka--there is no “we,” not even in the form of some implicit collective in Dabi’s grammatical inflection, nor is there a question of "should." All Dabi’s doing is musing that the start (again, there’s no subject, and so no indication of the start of what, or the start as initiated by who) is happening early.

Toga's line communicates much the same, save that she does specify that the schedule/plan/arrangement is happening earlier than expected--which is totally true, since her line is in response to Dabi observing that Machia moving must mean Shigaraki's awake, and Shigaraki was supposed to be down for another month.

Shigaraki's line, like Dabi's, lacks a subject to describe what exactly is supposed to start as soon as Shigaraki wakes. He's saying something that would, in a more stilted way, be, "I wake up and then it's the start, right?"

None of these lines suggest that the characters are necessarily talking about any plan other than the one the PLF laid out. Yes, it looks somewhat damning that Shigaraki's first action (after getting himself a cape, anyway) is to have Machia bring him the League, but heck, maybe that was always the plan. Just because Shigaraki wants to rejoin his comrades doesn't mean the rest of the PLF didn't already have machinations that they were supposed to set into motion the moment Machia left. After all, the plan as Hawks understood it did involve simultaneous attacks on major cities--maybe the League was going to be spearheading one of those attacks. Further, Shigaraki knew something was wrong from the moment he regained consciousness, and we don’t know how that knowledge affected the call he made. Hell, maybe the original plan was for the League to be brought to meet him somewhere in a chartered limo; we don’t know.

It's telling that this idea that the League had a Secret Plan to screw over the MLA rarely seems to account for Mr. Compress and Spinner being confused over the suddenness of events. The response to questions about this seems to be that the "villain trio" knew about it, so the ignorance of the rest of the League can just be handwaved--the important members knew, and that's enough. This is ungenerous towards both Twice and Mr. Compress, but I have got particularly little time for Spinner, the narrator of MVA and guy who decided to devote his all to Shigaraki, being disrespected in this fashion. More on that later.

|| Shigaraki says he won't forgive the Liberation Army for messing with peoples' feelings, so he would never really mean it when he forges an alliance with them.

Shigaraki does say he won't forgive the MLA, but consider what he did to the MLA and its leader. He destroyed most of their stronghold, killed scores of them, is directly responsible for Re-Destro losing his legs, and saw that vaunted descendant of Destro about six inches shy of full forehead-on-the-ground dogeza. The League Shigaraki commands killed a great many more of them, including one of their inner circle. He commandeered the Liberation Army, its resources, and its grand cause. I think it’s safe to say he’s more than responded in kind!

I'm not saying Shigaraki feels for the MLA the same way he does about the League, far from it, but I do think he's practical enough after two hundred chapters of character development not to throw them away out of spite. In Chapter 246, he tells Ujiko explicitly, "When someone offers me something, I take it," and, "I'm done taking the heroes lightly. I'll use everything I've got to obliterate the dregs All Might left behind." From a purely practical standpoint, if he intends to throw everything he has at the heroes, he has no reason to throw the MLA under the bus, and 116,000 reasons to keep them around. I'm altogether sure that, so long as they stood to be useful to his plans, he would have kept them around.

|| The MLA is quirk supremacist, like Endeavor, so Dabi would never work with them. + || Dabi is just using Skeptic against Skeptic's will; it’s not a willing partnership.

I hadn’t seen the second point in the wild, but I suppose it must be how the “The League will betray the MLA” theorists are getting around Dabi and Skeptic’s clear collaboration and how that collaboration totally scuttles the first point, huh? Hilarious.

Anyway, setting aside the fact that Dabi showed up to the one planning session we were shown when even Geten didn’t, there’s evidence in the canon that Dabi was working with Skeptic since even before the raid. Consider that Dabi’s video was filmed at the villa (the wall paneling and the style of the couch both match) and ask yourself where the camera he used came from. Once the filming was complete, where was the video stored such that Skeptic could access it from his laptop? If Dabi’d had it on an SD card and Skeptic was seeing it for the first time, why didn’t Spinner, Compress and Toga watch it alongside him? Surely Skeptic would need to watch it through at least once to know when to splice in the footage of Jin’s death for maximum dramatic impact? On that note, by far the most telling piece of evidence is this: if Dabi wasn't already working with Skeptic, then why was he wearing one of Skeptic's body cameras during his confrontation with Hawks?

Further, Skeptic's protest when he’s pulled onto Machia isn't that he doesn’t want to be with the League; it’s that he doesn’t want to leave Re-Destro behind. Once he's resigned that it's going to happen, though, he's cocky about his talents and complimentary of Dabi's big reveal, even if he is exasperated about the League's antics. It's ambiguous, I admit, but given that Dabi's wearing his cameras, he had to have known Dabi had a reason for them--and given that he is both abrasive and mouthy, I can’t imagine he wouldn’t have demanded to know what that reason was.

Hell, Dabi even thanks Skeptic for his editing work, which is more direct positive approval than he's ever shown anyone in the League. That much vaunted panel of Spinner telling Toga to come back to the League? Dabi's grinning, which in isolation you could read as a certain rueful affection, but with the full context of the chapter, it becomes apparent that Dabi is grinning at Skeptic's laptop, seconds after telling Skeptic to "hurry up." Skeptic is, at that moment, probably gearing up the video to project nationwide, and Dabi’s more focused on that than he is Toga’s crisis, even when Compress directly appeals to him for aid. He tells Compress he doesn’t care, the same way he told Hawks he doesn't give a damn about the League.

Let me be clear here: I'm inclined to take Dabi at his word. I think Dabi hangs around the League because, for all that he says one man's conviction can shake the world, he also knows his own limits, and the League offers safety in numbers and an avenue to pursue his revenge. Maybe he finds them acceptable enough company, maybe he even does like them a bit despite himself, but I think any affection he might have for them is entirely incidental to his views on their usefulness. In the same way, while he's willing to bail on the MLA when the heroes attack, I don't think it was his plan to do so, especially not given his apparent immediate regard for Skeptic, as seen in the deleted scene here. Sure, he dislikes Geten, but ultimately, Geten is a stupid kid too tied up in his care for Re-Destro--who's now worshipping the ground Shigaraki walks on--to really be getting in Dabi's way.

Maybe if the MLA really were as quirk supremacist as Geten makes them out to be, Dabi would be actively looking for a way to see ‘em burn, but as I’ve said countless times before, Geten is not a reliable narrator vis a vis the MLA's doctrine. Now, obviously I don't expect Dabi to give them an unearned benefit of the doubt,(1) not after what he heard Geten say, but if Dabi has been working with Skeptic, it doesn't take a genius to realize that while Anthropomorph is a perfectly good quirk, it is categorically not what primarily defines Skeptic’s "worth" in the MLA societal microcosm.

Nothing that Skeptic does reflects the way Geten talks about "elevating one's ability" or "sheer strength" in the way that HeroAca fandom tends to understand as referring to flashy and offensive quirks. And yet, Skeptic is a ranked advisor warranting an introductory panel with RD's inner circle and Geten is not. Perhaps, just perhaps, this might have led Dabi to reevaluating his initial assessment just slightly?

|| Mr. Compress rejects the PLF moniker for Shigaraki, ergo Mr. Compress didn’t genuinely associate Shigaraki and the League with the PLF.

So, this one's pretty wild, because, in the same chapter that had people crowing about Mr. Compress's dialogue, Mr. Compress's actions show the exact opposite of the conclusion this theory would demand. Specifically, if it was always the League's plan to ditch the MLA, Mr. Compress would have darted right past Skeptic, ignoring the man's cries for help. He doesn't--he picks Skeptic up on the way past and (at least in the volume corrections) deposits him safe with Dabi in Spinner's scarf. Of course, Skeptic still stands to be useful, but if one acknowledges that Skeptic's usefulness is reason enough not to abandon him, then what exactly is the argument for leaving 116,000 perfectly useful warm bodies behind?

But let's set aside Compress rescuing Skeptic and focus on the actual point, because that point in itself is still flawed. Mr. Compress's thoughts on the PLF in the specific talk bubble in question are somewhat ambiguous. It's another case of the Viz translation making a couple of assumptions that are just that--assumptions.

Compress's words in the Japanese are as follows:

Chōjō Kaihō Sensen.… Viran rengo no Shigaraki Tomura ga…

Viz then renders the line like so:

The Paranormal Liberation Front's… No, the League of Villain's Shigaraki…

Note that in the Japanese, the possessive no is only included once, to indicate Shigaraki's association with the League. Further, the original doesn't indicate any negation in Compress's thoughts. Yes, he could be rejecting the PLF association for Shigaraki, but he could as easily be narrowing his scope to Shigaraki as the figure he represents to the League, rather than the figure he represents to the PLF--not rejecting wholesale, but rather becoming more specific. Compress might also be thinking first of the PLF as a general organization, then narrowing down to Shigaraki specifically.

Rather than reading this line as an indication that Compress regards the PLF as temporary, I was heartened by the fact that Compress thought about the PLF at all! If the League really had been planning to discard them this entire time, then there's no reason for Compress to have ever taken the Front seriously enough to have thought about them in that moment of crisis. You can carry this back further, too. In Chapter 258, when Twice is asking Hawks for help, he says that Spinner and Compress have been in meetings for days. Coupled with Compress's first thought about the entity that will carry out Harima's desired reformation being the Liberation Front (or possibly "the Liberation Front's Shigaraki"), this indicates to me that Compress was taking it seriously, not just gorging himself on sushi on the MLA's dime.

Indeed, back in Ujiko's lab, when it was just Shigaraki talking about his backstory and his dreams of destruction, Compress looks the opposite of impressed; we know from his narration in 294 that he liked the League because they didn't place any importance on one another’s pasts. Yet, at some point, his view shifted to believing that fulfilling his ancestor's ambition, his bloodline’s duty, really might be back on the table. We as readers don't quite know when that shift happened, but given, again, his initial mental invocation of the PLF, I think we can assume that it's tied to that alliance, those resources. And sure, when the moment of crisis happens and he's really defining who and what Shigaraki is to him, and where his values and priorities lie, it's with the League and Shigaraki as the leader of the League. But that doesn't mean he never had his hopes for the PLF at all, or was partaking in plans to ditch them.

Also too, this is a man who was lamenting the loss of their partnership with Overhaul, a man who personally maimed him, on top of killing a comrade. You're telling me the guy who shrugged off his animosity towards Overhaul would willingly allow the League to plot sabotage against even wealthier collaborators against whom he has even less reason to hold a grudge? Come on, guys.

|| Toga hated Curious, so she wouldn't want to work with the MLA either.

This one's easy: Toga pretty explicitly hated Curious, but she's even more explicit that she likes the MLA because she thinks the world they want to create is wonderful. She says this verbatim at the end of 225, after Curious has spent the entire chapter hounding her with explosions and intrusive questions. What turns her animosity on Curious is not some reveal that the MLA's world would be terrible after all, but Curious calling Toga's "normal" miserable and tragic. Essentially, she doesn't object to the world the MLA wants to bring about; she objects to being turned into a martyr for that world, especially when that martyrdom requires that the things that make Toga happy be characterized as horrific misfortunes.

Toga doesn't like Curious; she kills Curious. And then she comes into a position of leadership, and we don't know a lot about how that position takes her, but she seems delighted to be walking out onto the stage to be announced as such, and she makes active contributions to the discussion of the PLF's plans in Chapter 245. We are, again, given no indication that her lethal response to Curious means that she's planning to ditch the MLA on the whole.

Incidentally, Curious asserts what she does about Toga only in the context of the world as it stands. The world's rejection of Toga's normal, and the extremes that rejection drove Toga to, are what Curious considers tragic and miserable, not Toga's fascination with blood in and of itself. She clearly believes that, in the world the MLA envisions, Toga's life would not be so miserable because she would never have been oppressed to the degree that she snapped. And frankly, Curious isn't wrong. The only reason she is a villain in that scene is that she's willing to murder Toga to project that tragedy to the world. If she'd been willing to sit down and have a civil interview with Toga to print it in her newspaper, she would have been fine.

|| Twice would never forgive them for what they did to Giran.

You know, this is a totally fair point. It is, however, somewhat complicated by the fact that Giran himself never left the PLF. Now, there’s almost certainly something to be said about Giran’s whole information broker shtick being terminally compromised by his capture, his maiming, his client list being hacked, etc. He also had a bunch of identifying items strewn all over the country that were covered in the national news, items that people who associated with him closely certainly would have recognized. Maybe he’s laying low for a while?

I don’t know why Giran was still around by the time of the raid. I can theorize about his pragmatism or what have you, but the canon really doesn’t give us anything to go on. Still, if he really hated the MLA all that much, as he would be totally justified in doing, it’s pretty bizarre that Horikoshi showed him twice in PLF crowd scenes post-Deika looking nothing worse than kind of confused and uneasy. Heck, you’d think he would at least have merited a better seat in the crowd for the big merger announcement.

Giran aside, the fact that Twice never does hit it off with anyone in his regiment is, I think, telling. If there’s anyone in the League that intentionally kept himself at a distance from the MLA because of hard feelings, it’s likely Twice. After all, if he had befriended anyone, he presumably wouldn’t have needed to go to Hawks for tutoring almost an entire month after Deika. That said, the fact that Twice does go running to Hawks for tutoring shows that he’s at least doing his best to act in accordance with what he thinks Shigaraki and the rest want. That doesn’t preclude the League having a secret plan that he’s either in on and playing along with, or hasn’t been told about because he might not be able to stop himself from vocalizing about it. Still, while absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, obviously absence of evidence is not evidence of presence. So, lacking any sign that the rest of the League is planning treachery, I’m not inclined to assume Twice’s lack of forgiveness is indicative of anything other than his own feelings.

|| [Error: argument about Spinner's opinion on the PLF not found.]

:: INCOMING SALT WARNING :: INCOMING SALT WARNING ::

This is the one that really gets to me. I have never seen an argument that the League is planning to betray the PLF that convincingly explains the fact that Spinner, to all available evidence, threw himself wholeheartedly into trying to make the PLF succeed. To be more precise, I have seen one explanation, and that explanation is that the plan to ditch the MLA was a secret that only Shigaraki, Dabi and sometimes Toga knew about, and to reiterate, that is bullshit.

In my experience, this is an explanation proposed by people who care about Spinner only insofar as he can be a Soft Gaymer Boyfriend or score them rhetorical points, but have little to no interest in his ongoing--and, indeed, increasing--importance to the League generally and Shigaraki’s arc specifically. The dude who talked about how Twice’s home was the League, who got through to Toga while still respecting her choice when no one else could, the guy who recognized the hollowness within Shigaraki but also bonded with him over video games, the man who Mr. Compress said was Shigaraki’s most devoted follower(2)--this man did not do all of that for people in this fandom to say, “Oh, well, the others probably just kept it a secret from him because they thought he’d be bad at lying.”

Really? “Bad at lying?” And that’s an adequate justification, is it, for Shigaraki letting Spinner toil for months under false pretenses? For lying to the man who adores him the most? Of course it isn’t, but the people who theorize this don’t really care about Spinner’s adoration for Shigaraki, or the fact that Shigaraki rewarding Spinner’s feelings by allowing him to dedicate himself unstintingly to something Shigaraki was planning to discard from the beginning would be a blatant abuse of Spinner’s trust.

I have never seen anyone try to argue that Spinner was in on a plan to betray the MLA all along. That’s because it’s patently obvious that Spinner--forthright, direct Spinner, who named the merged organization with Re-Destro, spends all his time in meetings, has a direct exchange with Re-Destro about the state of their plans, and is probably the reason RD started wearing polka dots--went all-in on the PLF. But for the people who propose the “the League was always going to bail” theory, Spinner and his labors are an afterthought.

Spinner is not an afterthought. Where Mr. Compress has been captured, Toga could hypothetically be peeled away from the League via Uraraka, and Dabi almost certainly will be peeled away via the Todoroki plot, Spinner’s driving motivation at this point is Shigaraki himself. He connected to Shigaraki’s nihilism, his hatred, but also his humanity--the humanity in Shigaraki Tomura, not in Shimura Tenko. His empathy didn’t spring from contrived psychic glimpses of crying 5-year-olds, but from long months of observation, doubt, and gradually deepening wonder. He’s the only person currently with Shigaraki that I can see caring enough about Shigaraki’s welfare that he might sacrifice his own goals and desires to help Deku save him.

Spinner is not an afterthought, and I refuse to build or entertain theories that treat him that way. So as to his opinions on the MLA? Despite having his own reasons to be leery of them based on how shabbily Trumpet treated him, he was obviously trying to make the Paranormal Liberation Front succeed, which means he must have believed that Shigaraki wanted it to succeed. Therefore, unless you’re prepared to assert that Shigaraki (and everyone else who was in on it!) was cruel enough to lie to Spinner about something he was devoting so much time and energy to, the inescapable conclusion is that Shigaraki also wanted the Front to succeed.

(Note: After letting a friend pre-read this, I have been informed that there is, in fact, one explanation offered for Spinner knowing the League was going to abandon the PLF but working his ass off on the venture anyway, and that explanation is, “Something something wants to prove himself because low self-esteem.” This is so ridiculous I can’t even bring myself to edit this post accordingly. Low self-esteem! Because nothing would alleviate Spinner's low self-esteem like toiling for months over something that holds no worth to the people he actually cares about, right? Right?? Bah. Humbug!)

And but so, to wrap all that up: I fundamentally disagree that the League viewed the Paranormal Liberation Front as a temporary arrangement, at least to the extent that they were actively planning to betray their newfound--new won--allies. The fact that I don't think the League intended to discard the MLA out of hand does, thus, influence my opinion that, whatever Geten's fate will be, I'm pretty sure it's not going to be, "He gets murdered in a way that resembles nothing so much as a sick revenge fantasy dozens of chapters after the last point when such a death would have been remotely tonally appropriate."

Thanks for the ask, anon! Sorry about-- *waves at all of this*

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(1) Not that Mr. “Burns Random Delinquents Alive For Not Measuring Up To His Standards For Villainy” has any moral standing to criticize others for how they determine the value of peoples’ lives, mind.

(2) Other translations for the verb in Mr. Compress’s Japanese line of, “You are the one who ____s Shigaraki the most,” include yearn for, long for, pine for, miss, love dearly, adore, idolize, and revere. “Most devoted follower” is accurate enough, but considerably less homo than some of the things we could have gotten there.

An Archive of Someone’s Own: my experiences being groomed in fandom circles on AO3

TW: Childhood sexual abuse, grooming, mentions of incest and rape.

Keep reading

- I missed you…

Скетчи с глупенькими Шуи и Томурой

////

Sketches with silly Shui and Tomura

so the heteromorph discrimination plotline had seemed to explode into the manga with Chapter 370 when the story switched battles to the site of Central Hospital where Spinner is leading disgruntled heteromorphs to retrieve Kurogiri;

though the story did hint it would be addressed since Chapter 310 when Ordinary Woman (big heteromorph gal) was attacked by civilians because they didn’t like they was she looked;

and the first time we got confirmation that such prejudice exists in the HeroAca world was Chapter 220, when the League massacres a bunch of CRC bigots and Spinner’s backstory was revealed (that he suffered through such discrimination all his life and was finally motivated to do something about suffocating in the pervasive heteromorphobic hostile environment - among other things - when he saw Stain on TV);

but I think the story did well to hint at this issue throughout the manga in the background. I would say the first ever hint we get is all the way in Chapter 5, when Deku arrived on his first day at UA and noticed his classroom door was huge:

Has to be accessible to everyone, he says, and that greatly stood out to me.

Because, see, heteromorphic discrimination isn't just judging people by their looks - which is often the go-to discrimination allegory fiction uses, usually based on the irl social construction of race and the issue of racism; nor is it being prejudiced against people with superpowers, because this is a world where 80% of the population have a superpower and having a quirk is accepted (in fact, not having a quirk is considered strange and unusual); rather, heteromorphic discrimination in the HeroAca World takes elements from, yeah, racism, but also ableism.

In this world, quirks gives people a wide, wide diversity of appearances - different body sizes, shapes, anatomy, functions. And different people have different needs. Someone with a quirk that gives them a tail would need a hole cut into their pants so their tail can go through and they can actually wear the pants. Someone who's really, really tall - whether because they have a giraffe neck quirk or just a big body size quirk - would need buildings to have doors that fit them.

How is this ableism? Well, one big issue in disability rights is accommodation. As wikipedia puts it:

Disability discrimination, which treats non-disabled individuals as the standard of 'normal living', results in public and private places and services, educational settings, and social services that are built to serve 'standard' people, thereby excluding those with various disabilities.

A wheelchair user can't go up steps. An event that communicates only through talking would not allow deaf people to participate fully. A world where only abled-bodied people can travel, can communicate, can exist is one that excludes disabled people, preventing them from being full members of their community, and this is the definition of discrimination.

Heteromorphs and people with body-altering quirks in HeroAca world aren't disabled. However, they do have atypical bodies and sometimes unique requirements to live regularly as anyone else. If this impedes their daily functioning, then they would have what can be classified as an impairment. If that impairment causes them to face a barrier that stops them from interacting with other people and the larger outside world, then it can be classified as a disability.

This fluid nature of what can be classified as an impairment or disability means depending on the situation, an able-bodied person can technically experience barriers similar to what disabled people experience.

This is the social model of disability. That

the origins of disability [are] the mental attitudes and physical structures of society, rather than a medical condition faced by an individual...

the most significant barrier for individuals with disabilities is not the disability itself; rather the most significant barrier is the environment in which a person with a disability must interact. Society disables people, through designing everything to meet the needs of the majority of people who are not disabled.

So, if someone with lots of limbs and appendages can't find clothes that fit them, they cannot go outside without violating public decency laws. If someone who's really big can't fit through a standard door and enter buildings, they're effectively blocked from going to school, public transportation, work, etc. This is best illustrated and pointed out explicitly by Kamayan, a character with a giant mantis quirk:

He's from Vigilantes, but the problem he faces is something Horikoshi has already considered, hence the panel from Chapter 5 above.

In fact, Mt. Lady also faced this problem in Chapter 1, when she is unable to fight a Villain and save Bakugou because she's unable to enter a street:

Luckily for Mt. Lady, her quirk allows her to shrink to normal size. But imagine if she was just big like that always. She would be unable to go anywhere. There probably is a quirk out there that is just that: makes someone big, all the time.

These quirks are individual issues. They can technically be viewed as a personal problem, and if the person is unhappy with their situation, then it's up to them to get it 'fixed'. However, that sort of defeats the purpose of having a quirk and accepting that this world is one where everyone has a quirk and should be allowed to exist as they are. Plus, heteromorphs are a significant portion of society.

Rather than telling people whose quirks makes them super tall to stay home - and this would be exclusion and discrimination - why not just build bigger doors and buildings? UA does this, and they're in the right. However, as Kamayan and Mt. Lady (Big Mode) shows, there are still places that don't do this. As Kamayan notes:

All the way in the beginning of the story in Chapter 5, the issue of accessibility in regards to atypical bodies. Because heteromorphs are people who have atypical bodies, they are most likely to face issues of accommodations. If they do, and they are unable to live well under the current status quo, then yeah, what they go through would be discrimination. Most heteromorphs we see in the series seem to be getting by okay, but it's easy to imagine that they can and have faced barriers because of their body-altering quirks:

Ojiro requires his clothes to be altered. Shoji is apparently unable to wear a coat, and needs a poncho-like garment in cold weather. These aren't big issues because as Ojiro's profile states: "altering clothing have become standard practice at clothing stores", but a store can also easily just refuse to do so. A store can refuse to serve heteromorph customers because they find tailoring annoying. They don't need to hate and insult heteromorphs for it to be discrimination; they just have to not care.

(does it also cause more money, to ask for alterations? Is it something that gives heteromorphs financial issues, if they need different enough accommodations?)

However, often when a minority bring up an issue they face to the majority and suggest addressing it, the apathy can quickly change to annoyance. Actually, any kind of annoyance can mutate into outright disdain and prejudice. In a span of a second, the majority can go from indifferent, maybe even mildly supportive (as long as it doesn't inconvenience them), to hostility with a desire to remind the minority they're different, they're unwanted, they are not quite human, not like the majority.

Chapter 56 shows this attitude exactly. Tsuragamae Kenji is the Chief of Police, but when he suggested something that someone found disagreeable, he is quickly disrespected and called a 'mutt' (in the original Japanese, 「この犬…」 "this dog...").

This would probably be considered a microaggression, calling someone with an animal-heteromorphic-quirk an animal. The first instance of microaggression in the manga is actually in Chapter 6, in which Shoji is asked if he's an 'gorilla' or 'octopus'. This was actually addressed as such in Chapter 371! The next instance is Chapter 21, in which Officer Sansa is subjected to the stereotype of... not being a police dog, I guess?)

They're just microaggression, words that come and go, perhaps, but the attitudes that give microaggression space to exist stem from the same place as anti-acceptance on the level of denying accessibility.

The examples of anti-acceptance so far talked about in this post is relatively minor, and actually just hinted at. However, in Chapter 57, we are given a rather extreme example of body modification in order to fit the 'norm'. In Chapter 57, we meet Daikaku Miyagi, whose appearance is very notable in that one of his horns look like it was cut off. Turns out, that's exactly what happened.

Daikaku Miyagi was praised this deed, as it was considered being considerate of his TV audiences . It's true this is a personal decision, and he can do whatever he feels is best for him, but one has to wonder about why instead of news stations accommodating easily editable visual presentations, the fix is chopping off a healthy body part.

The extra notes that describe his situation calls it 'rejection of Quirks'. In the same chapter, Gran Torino calls the current era "an age of suppression". Rejection, suppression - we are shown that this is a quirk society that hasn't actually embraced and accommodated quirks. Rather, quirk use is banned and a norm is defined that everyone is encouraged to follow. That seems simple enough when your quirk is an emitter that you can just not emit from your body.

So what happens when your quirk *is* your body? Which brings up questions of how heteromorphs live in such a society. Is using an extra appendage quirk use? If you have a full-body heteromorphic quirk and you get in a tussle in the heat of the moment, is that regular assault or is quirk use added onto the charges? People with quirks that gives them a 'scary' heteromorphic appearance - is that why it looks like these kind of people dominate the role of villains? The first Villain the reader ever sees in the manga is a heteromorph (the purse-snatcher). As is the second (Sludge Villain). Most of the crowd of Villains that Shigaraki brings to invade UA seems to be heteromorphs, actually.

One or two heteromorphic villains is just two randos running around. When it becomes a pattern that most Villains in HeroAca seem to be heteromorphs, the 'why' needs to be asked and a cause identified. Is it because they feel suppressed, as Gran Torino says? Rejected because of their appearance and quirks? If being a heteromorph means a higher chance of receiving microaggressions and being excluded from society - pushed to the margins, and left to do questionable things to survive - and a high chances of falling into Villainy, there is probably an societal problem.

All this is in the first 100 chapters. Similar to the development of Villains and the causes of that villany, the issue that heteromorphs face isn't focused on - they're scary looking villains, the issues brought up about Hero Society is vaguely implied. Horikoshi himself said he didn't expand on the Villains much at first on purpose because he wanted them unknowable and scary.

Of course, I would say Heteromorph Discrimination is a subsection within a larger category of Quirk Discrimination. Or maybe in-universe, this can be a type of 'intersectionality'. Toga's backstory in Chapter 227 is the failure of quirk counseling, but as we see in Chapter 370, about 150 chapters after Chapter 227, quirk counseling has also failed heteromorphs because it's 'one size fits all' simply was not equip to deal with the inherent variability of heteromorphic quirks. Meanwhile, the concept of 'kegare' - impurity - that's first introduced by the CRC in Chapter 220 and expanded on in Shouji's backstory recently in Chatper 371, being a base for why heteromorphs are hated in the countryside - that they defile the land and taint others - is also something that can apply to quirks like Shigaraki's and Toga's: decay/death and blood are things that would be considered 'impure' and thus avoided.

In anycase, throughout the manga, we're give subtle, background examples of issues heteromorphs face, like accessibility, dehumanization, making up a higher proportions of villains. Altogether, it pointed to plain discrimination, of which a lifetime of experiencing can wear a person hollow. To quote Shigaraki/Tenko, "it built up...little by little, over time". And then it exploded, but the fuse had been slowly burning for quite a while.

ngl as someone who's dad to deal with parents similar to EndNevWhore I'd pay money to see Shouto have some sort of break down or Anything because of him but Nope Never Gonna Happen

this is a super good point bcs in addition to all the sucking up to endv going on, the effects of abuse are not dealt with at all?? right now, it feels like the worst consequence of abuse is hurt feelings that can be apologized for, rather than  lasting impacts on a survivor’s psychology that can take so many years and so much therapy to get over, if that’s at all possible. :/