Chapter Text
Pony Tsunotori held her lunch tray close to her chest, carefully weaving her way around the scattered crowd of students clogging up the lunch line as she tried to make her way back to her usual table. More than once, an eager student carelessly bumped into her, too caught up in their own devices to even offer up an ‘excuse me’. If it weren’t for her hooves keeping her steady, she probably would’ve been knocked to the ground by now.
Unfortunately, she’d become accustomed to this kind of behavior, with the cafeteria being much livelier than usual lately, no doubt thanks to the threat of exams looming over everyone’s heads. With the endless hours of studying, many students have been given far less time to hang out and chat with their friends, making them cherish the brief moments they could spend together that much more.
Despite that, Pony herself wasn’t in much of a socializing mood. As extroverted as she could be, the ever-present language barrier between her and her classmates made conversations tiring after a while. This was one of the few times of the day that she’d rather be left to her own devices.
Taking her usual seat, she reached behind her shoulder and searched through her backpack’s front pouch, eventually pulling out her favorite manga, which she’d been meaning to catch up on for a while now.
“What do you have there, Tsunotori?” Asked Kendo, taking the seat right beside her.
“I’m telling you, call me Pony,” she corrected, always one to keep things casual. “And this is my new favorite manga right now: My Samurai Academia!” She showed the cover to her friend, never one to pass up the opportunity to gush about her interests. “It got all kinds of cool fights and many weapons!”
“That sounds fun. What is it abou…” She suddenly trailed off, her gaze looking right past Pony as if she wasn’t even there. “Hold on, Pony. Gotta deal with something real quick.”
She got up, and Pony watched her walk over to Class 1-A’s table, where she could immediately see the problem. One chop to the neck later, and Kendo was dragging Monoma back to the 1-B table, placing his limp body on the unoccupied seat to the right of Pony. “Do you always need to antagonize them like that?” She asked him, sounding like she was trying to hold back her annoyance.
“I’m not antagonizing them!” Monoma sprang back to life, startling Pony slightly. “I’m simply reminding them who the real stars of the show are! And we’ll prove that to them when we dominate the upcoming exams!”
“Just because we all plan on acing exams does not mean we’re doing along with your plan,” Kendo reminded him before switching her attention back to Pony. “So what were you saying about your manga?”
“Oh right!” She opened her book up to one of the fight scenes and laid it across the table. “It’s about samurai with magic powers gifted to them by ancient ancestors. But the main character has no powers, so his mentor pass down his own cursed power. But it so powerful that he almost explodes whenever he uses it, so he goes to samurai school to learn how to be better samurai.”
“Huh, neat.” Kendo leaned in, admiring the expertly crafted artwork.
“Now that’s the kind of underdog story I can relate to on a personal level,” Monoma butted in, to which Pony gave him an odd look.
“Personal? Since when does your Quirk hurts you?”
She watched in amusement as Monoma’s mask of bravado slipped for a brief moment. “Well, it could depending on whose Quirk I copy. Like Midoriya’s.” He pointed over to the boy he was just bothering a minute ago. “Of course, I’d have to be insane to borrow a self-destructive power.”
“But if you’re only copying Midoriya’s power, wouldn’t that make him the main character? Not you?” Kendo reasoned, her and Pony noticing the way his eye twitched at that question.
“Of course not!” He snapped, slamming his hands on the table. “Just look at Midoriya. Does he really give off main character energy?”
Pony curiously tilted her head. “Wuzzat?”
”It’s like… you know!” Monoma struggled to put it into words, making odd gestures with his hands. “There are some people you look at, and you’re like ‘wow, they totally look like they’d be the hero of a story!’ Those kinds of vibes!”
“So basically the opposite kind of vibes you give off?” Setsuna’s disembodied head floated up to the group, sensing the opportunity to tease her classmate.
Monoma scoffed as if she’d just insulted his mother. “You take that back!”
While the two proceeded to bicker, Pony continued to think about what Monoma and Kendo had said. She hadn’t paid Izuku much mind before now, but it seemed he had a bit more in common with her manga’s protagonist than she thought. Heck, they even looked somewhat alike, sporting a similar messy hairstyle and soft, innocent baby face.
That got her thinking; she had long since made the comparison between the Quirk-populated world she lived in and the setting of a shonen manga, even more so when she moved to Japan and began UA. Would that mean there was also a main character to go along with it? And could that main character be Izuku?
‘No, of course not,’ she internally dismissed the thought, shaking her head while laughing at her stupidity. If Izuku was the main character, if the world truly revolved around him, that would make her and the rest of her class nothing more than side characters, confirming Monoma’s worst nightmares.
Besides, the protagonist of My Samurai Academia had more than just a cursed power; he had a hotheaded rival, a cheery and supportive love-interest, and a large cast of friends and lesser rivals with varying levels of relevancy depending on the arc. Izuku didn’t have any of that.
“Deku!” She was suddenly pulled from her thoughts by the unmistakable shout of Katsuki Bakugo, whose rants could often be heard across the entire cafeteria. “Don’t think you’re gonna do better than me on exams. I’ll beat you and everyone else in the class! Just like I always do!”
Izuku, for his part, met Katsuki’s anger with confusion. “Okay…? I’ll keep that in mind.”
Pony fought down the panic bubbling up within her. Sure, that might have sounded like textbook ‘hotheaded rival’ behavior, but she doubted it meant much in the grand scheme of things.
That line of thinking became much harder to justify when she saw the girl she recognized as Ochako Uraraka slide up to Izuku, her smile equal parts cheery and determined. “Don’t worry about what he says, Deku. I’m sure you’ll do great on the exams, just like you always do.”
“Oh!” Izuku perked up at her words of encouragement. “Y-yeah! Same to you!” He shared a light fist bump with Ochako, the blush on his face visible to everyone except her.
“That’s the spirit, you two!” 1-A’s class rep came up and patted them both on the shoulder. “We should all strive to improve not only as heroes, but as students!”
“Mm-hm,” Todoroki nodded, more focused on his bowl of soba than anything else going on.
Pony felt her heart plummet into her stomach. In less than a minute, Izuku had proved himself a spitting image of her manga’s protagonist, from his powers, to his friends, to his rival. Not only that, but if the USJ incident and the reports from Hosu were any indication, then trouble seemed to be attracted to him like a bee to honey, as was the case with any shonen protagonist.
Looking away from Izuku, she numbly slumped forward in her seat, resting her chin on the table as she despondently stared off into the distance. If Izuku truly was the hero of the big, overarching story she called life, then what did that mean for her? Was she just some nobody? Another face in the crowd who was destined to live a life of mediocrity?
“I don’t know what you’re so miffed about.” In the midst of her sulking, she picked up on the ongoing argument between Monoma and Setsuna. “So what if you’re not one of the ‘main characters’? That just means less responsibility for us. Have you ever watched a TV show in your life? Some of those main characters live pretty shitty lives.”
“It’s not about responsibility,” Monoma fired back, still displeased with her, “it’s about the title, the prestige! Don’t you want to look at the world and say ‘I am not useless, I am important, and you cannot ignore me’?”
“Do… you have some sort of inferiority complex? Because it sounds like you have an inferiority complex.”
“What? Of course not!”
At her classmate’s words, Pony raised her chin off the table, her mind deep in thought. She had been so focused on the prospect of not being a main character that she never stopped to consider if she even wanted to be one in the first place. As a hero in training, she knew she’d be putting her life on the line more than once. But to be a main character, where dangerous, life-altering events happened on a near-daily basis, all during her first year of high school, sounded both stressful and terrifying. She’d heard horror stories about what went down at the USJ, and she didn’t want to experience anything like that during what were supposed to be her formative years.
With all that in mind, being a side character didn’t sound as bad to her. Sure, she might not amount to as much as her sister class, but at least she didn't have to be traumatized by constant near-death experiences. She preferred slice of life anime over shonen anyways.
Now that she was over what was perhaps the world’s shortest existential crisis, she sat back up and continued reading through her manga. She was glad to be doing so, as the story had been knee-deep in its war arc for a while now, and this latest chapter was something she’d been looking forward to for…
Oh…
Oh no…
Pony’s already large eyes widened to ungodly proportions as she scanned through the panels, growing more and more stressed as she watched the carnage unfold. It was like a car crash she couldn’t look away from, her sense of morbid curiosity compelling her to turn to the next page despite knowing what awaited her there.
“Pony, are you alright?” Kendo spoke up. “You’ve silently flipped through like ten expressions in the past minute alone.”
“WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” Pony cried out, capturing the attention of the rest of her class.
“Not without a fight, I’m hoping,” Tetsutetsu argued, ready to fight against whatever unseen force was threatening them at the moment.
“What are you talking about?” The class rep continued, more confused than anyone else. “Is this about your manga?”
“LOOK!” Pony shoved her manga in her face. “Izzy’s main character! We’re side characters! You know what that means? We’re expendable! Main villains kills us for shock value! No one cares that we die!”
“Side characters?! How many times do I have to tell you that we’re not-”
“Not now.” Kendo swiftly knocked Monoma out again before looking at Pony like she was some insane conspiracy theorist. “I think you’re getting a bit too into your book there. This is real life, not a manga.”
“Real life is a manga!” She shot up, yelling so that the entire table could hear her.
“No, I’m Manga,” Manga Fukidashi politely raised his hand.
“No! Do you not see?! Our lives are a manga! We have crazy powers! We do crazy fights! There’s the yelling and punching and the tragic backstories!”
“Yeah, that’s real life,” Kendo emphasized, only serving to frustrate Pony further.
“EXACTLY!” She clenched her forehead, feeling like she was going as insane as everyone thought she was. “You not getting it! Our lives follow tropes of shonen manga!”
“I thought it was vice-versa, and shonen manga tropes were based on real life,” Bondo corrected.
Shishida nodded his head in agreement. “My thoughts exactly. Artists often draw from their own life experiences.”
“That not how it works!” Despite, or perhaps because of her outburst, none of Pony’s classmates looked all too convinced.
“Her speech patterns have become unrecognizable,” Ibara observed her with a steady gaze. “Are you feeling under the weather? I can offer you some of my home-grown medicinal herbs.”
“I can offer you my exorcism kit.” Reiko pulled out some chalk and a set of wax candles.
“I’m not possessed! I just… Ah, fuck it…” She swore in English, stuffing her manga in her bag and storming off. She didn’t care if her classmates thought she was crazy. Once she proved herself right, they’d see she wasn’t crazy, then she could help save them from death by irrelevancy. But first, she had to save herself - a task which she already had a foolproof plan on how to accomplish.
It was super simple once she got down to it; main characters always had plot armor that prevented their death at the hands of just about any threat. And in the unlikely chance they did die, it’s only a matter of time until they get brought back by some sort of necromancy Quirk or whatever.
Such plot armor wasn’t just granted to anybody, however. Only the protagonist and their closest friends were granted a ‘get out of death free’ card. If Pony wanted any chance of surviving to her adult years, she had to become a main character herself, which would only occur if she successfully befriended Izuku Midoriya, becoming one of his most trusted allies.
Now with a plan set in stone, Pony steeled herself for what would perhaps be the most high-stakes mission of her entire life. She had made friends before, but never had her quest for companionship carried such a high failure tax. The lives of both herself and her classmates were in her lands, which left one very important question, one that would serve as the basis for her and Izuku’s entire relationship…
“What’s his favorite anime genre? Shonen? Harem? Mecha? He seems like a Mecha guy.”