Essay prompt: U.A. receives approximately twenty thousand applications yearly for our hero course. Why should U.A. High School train you specifically to be a hero? What makes you unique amongst so many applicants? You have 2000 words to use.
I Am the Final Case - by Ayano Shizuka
Dear U.A. admissions committee,
Heroes are good. Villains are bad. It's a concept so ubiquitous across Japanese society that even a preschooler knows it to be true.
From the moment babies begin to understand spoken language, the righteousness of Heroes and wickedness of villains is ingrained into their minds by their environment. Our parents, siblings, friends, and teachers enforce this pervasive truth, and from popular novels to blockbuster movies, every form of media supports it.
Yesterday, I walked to the nearest preschool and surveyed each child about their impressions of heroes and villains. Every child said essentially the same thing:
"Heroes are the good guys, villains are the bad guys."
The classification of an entire group of people as 'universally good' and another group as 'universally bad' should be alarming to those well-read in history, but let us first analyze the dictionary definitions of the words 'hero' and 'villain' before coming to a broader conclusion.
According to the dictionary, a 'hero' is "a licensed individual who uses their quirk to enforce the law." And a 'villain' is defined as "an individual who uses their quirk to break the law."
Although the top 500 heroes are incredibly popular and influential, the vast majority of heroes can still be boiled down to police who use their quirks to fight crime.
Okay, then.
"Police are the good guys, criminals are the bad guys." Is that a societally acceptable statement to make? Of course not!
The statement is simply incorrect! After all, to agree with such a statement requires a belief that every aspect of the law is just. If the law is ever unjust, then a criminal has the potential to be behaving morally, and police have the potential to act immorally.
In plain terms, "police can be bad guys sometimes, and criminals can be good guys sometimes."
Because obviously, the law is unjust in some areas! If the law were always just, we would not need a legislature to create new laws and modify old ones! And back when quirked people were a minority, discrimination against those with quirks was the law of the land! The law was the farthest thing from just back then.
And now, we come to the crux of the issue. Why, exactly, is the same broad generalization okay when used to compare heroes and villains? The preschoolers I surveyed repeated it tens of times, yet none of the adults seemed to bat an eye! Shouldn't the logic I laid out above apply to heroes and villains just as much?
Is it not true that if the law can sometimes be unjust, villains can be good?
Yes. The conclusion I've come to is that, as a society, we act in a contradictory and unfair manner toward villains. The heroes = good, villains = bad viewpoint that has become mainstream in Japanese society is fundamentally unreasonable.
Now, abstract logic is all well and good, but to be more convincing, I've decided to include three examples of villains who were subjected to unfair treatment by large chunks of society.
First, consider the case of Snowball, a B-class villain with a quirk that gave him the ability to read and manipulate the emotions of Animals.
Snowball was originally a man by the name of Hikaru Kamiki. He made a living as a humane animal treatment investigator by using his quirk to measure the happiness of livestock at thousands of farm facilities. However, he encountered a massive farm worth multiple billion yen where every animal was immensely miserable, yet the farm still appeared to meet federal regulations. No matter how intensely he searched, he could not find a single instance of animal mistreatment.
Despite reporting his findings to the higher-ups of the federal Animal Care agency, no further investigation was ever conducted. Eventually, Snowball felt he had no choice but to take things into his own hands. He boosted the anger of the livestock, causing a massive stampede that destroyed the entire farm and severely injured multiple farm workers.
Ultimately, he was charged and convicted with quirked assault and quirked destruction of property. He spent 26 years (the rest of his life) behind bars.
And yet, just a couple of years after Snowball's death, independent investigators discovered that the farm owner's daughter possessed a happiness absorption quirk. She had been sucking the positive emotions out of thousands of farm animals to create illegal drugs!
This evidence would have been crucial in securing Snowball a reduced sentence. But unfortunately, mainstream news networks managed to quickly and successfully brand Snowball as a "deranged villain who used his quirk as an excuse to cripple multiple people."
At that point, almost no investigators were willing to search for evidence that could corroborate Snowball's side of the story, and it took 28 years to uncover evidence that should have been found within a few months of investigation. After all, "heroes are the good guys, villains are the bad guys."
And who would ever commit social suicide by supporting a bad guy?
Next, consider the case of Ventus, a D-class villain with a floating quirk that allowed him to levitate at a fixed height.
He used his quirk to deface the tops of statues and government buildings in protest over the power and control that unelected HSPC members held above most Japanese citizens.
Although a 15-foot stepladder would have allowed any quirkless individual to accomplish the same thing that Ventus did, he was charged with quirked defacement of property and sentenced to 5 years in prison.
If he had used a stepladder instead, he would have faced six months of jail time at the very most. Unfortunately, he was designated as a D-class villain before the jury could even begin to discuss his crimes.
"Heroes are the good guys, and villains are the bad guys."
The jury gave him the harshest possible verdict because they thought of him as a villain. It's that simple.
Finally, consider the case of the A-class villain Lifestealer. Born Suzuki Sakura, she was only fourteen years old when her family was involved in a deadly car accident. Her mother, father, and two older brothers died in it.
According to leaked security footage, she was left barely alive with a life-threatening laceration on her Abdominal Aorta. Desperately clinging to life, she attempted to use her stamina absorption quirk on the family of three who had rammed into her car.
Under normal circumstances, this would not have helped her survive. But her quirk underwent a last-minute awakening, giving her the ability to absorb Life Energy to heal her injuries.
Lifestealer drained the family of three to death to save her own life. She was later charged with quirked mass murder and ultimately sentenced to the death penalty, despite arguing fiercely that her actions constituted self-defense. Her argument rested on a previous similar case that could function as a precedent for her own.
The case went like this:
The hero sidekick Ms. Lazer was crossing a crosswalk when she noticed a small bus barreling towards her. Her late realization left her with no choice but to use her quirk to blast the bus away (to save her own life).
Her self-defense killed three passengers and sent two more into a permanent coma. But she was not sentenced to a single minute of jail time nor fined a single yen.
Lifestealer argued that her actions were near-identical to that of Ms. Lazer. Both of them unintentionally caused the death of multiple people to preserve their own life. However, her opposition argued that as a licensed hero, only Ms. Lazer's actions could be trusted to stem purely from a desire to save her own life.
In contrast, they declared that Lifestealer's actions had a high chance of being motivated by a desire for revenge. As such, they argued that there was a large probability that Lifestealer killed multiple people purposefully. Therefore, she ought to be charged with mass murder.
Once again, "heroes are the good guys, and villains are the bad guys."
It is hard to say whose argument was correct, but one fact of the case is indisputable. The jury couldn't have been unbiased. As you already know, an unknown hacker posted Lifestealer's actions on QuirkTube under the title "Mysterious villain brutally drains the lives of three innocents."
The video now sits at 526 million views.
By the time Lifestealer's case was argued in court, nearly all of Japan had seen the video multiple times. They had read the title of the video multiple times.
And so, deep in the hearts and minds of the jurors, it was already decided that Lifestealer was not a scared teenage girl but a heinous villain. At that point her death was inevitable, no matter how sound her arguments were.
You might be a bit confused. Why did I spend 1400 words empathetically arguing in support of villains in my application to the U.A. hero course? The answer is simple yet contradictory:
I am the villain Lifestealer. I am the final case.
You could have several possible questions; I'll do my best to answer some of them.
First and most obviously: "Weren't you supposed to be dead?"
Yep. That's right. Suzuki Sakura is officially dead. As you read at the top of this essay, my newly assigned name is Ayano Shizuka. As a heads up, if you tell anybody but the U.A. staff any information about me, you'll get arrested for revealing state secrets.
I hypothesize that some top-level HSPC bureaucrat thought I would be a convenient tool, but whether I'm correct or not doesn't matter. What matters is that I managed to strike a deal. I get to live if I can become a top ten hero before turning twenty-five. Otherwise, they'll flip a switch, and a surgically implanted bomb in my head will kill me.
Full stop. That's it.
Next and most crucially: "Why should we believe you?"
Principal Nezu has connections. With that high-level brain of his, I'm sure he'll figure out a way to confirm that everything in this essay is accurate.
Third, and most enthrallingly: "How were you able to kick the zero pointer's head off?"
Okay, maybe not everything in this essay is completely honest. I did awaken the ability to absorb life. But I also gained the ability to absorb other physical properties. I'll just leave it at that!
(the HSPC will send over a complete dossier on the capabilities of my quirk within the next week)
You already know what makes me unique, so to conclude this essay I'll answer the most important question of all.
Why should U.A. High School train me specifically to be a hero?
This may be unfair of me, but I'll say it anyway. U.A. is my best chance to live past twenty-five.
You're all heroes, right? I'm sure you don't want my blood on your hands.
Sincerely, Ayano Shizuka
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