Title: My Hero School Adventure is All Wrong, As Expected
Author: storybookknight
Rating: T
Genre: Adventure/Humor
Status: In-Progress
Library Category:
Pairings:
Summary: Hikigaya Hachiman is the last person on earth who should ever apply to U.A. High School. Yet somehow, he manages anyway. In a world of irrepressible optimism and idealism, these are the adventures of a young man who believes that idealism is a lie.
Link: fanfiction.net, spacebattles

I was surprised to find this only in a passing MHA recommendation thread and figured it deserved a proper review. The premise is, as made obvious by the summary, a crossover between OreGairu (My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong, As I Expected) and MHA (My Hero Academia), with the protagonist from the former and setting of the latter as the major interplay. For those who find Midoriya a bit too similar to a certain rotund gem hybrid, Hikigaya's spot on characterization will be a breath of fresh air. For fans of OreGairu, you'll be happy to know that much of the extraneous cast of MHA has been pruned to make room for familiar faces.

Out of all the things this fic does well, I'd say the most impressive facet is the synthesis of the two source materials. Characterizations for both are spot on, and the way those characters interact with those from the other source material is equally well handled. Likewise, the action/adventure (or ''''shonen'''' if you're a fucking weeb) and romantic comedy tones balance out nicely, and Hikigaya's self sacrificing yet self destructive tendencies from his own canon fit well with the events presented in and adapted from MHA.

That said, it's not perfect. The writing, while more than servicable, is not going to take your breath away with any spectacular imagery or clever turns of phrase. The deviations from MHA canon are welcome and well thought out but not as frequent or completely original as one may prefer. And while I would never call this portrayal of Hikigaya a gary stu, nor a wank exactly, he loses the underdog status both socially and '''powerlevel''' wise much sooner than I'd prefer, undercutting the aforementioned synergy at times. It's not that he suddenly becomes the best and everyone loves him forever, but he does steadily become pretty broken and most people have massive amounts of respect for him at the time of writing this recommendation (Chapter 15). While I'd like to see this go in classic OreGairu fashion and blow up in his face, at this point I just don't think that's a realistic possibility. Which is a shame, because as the narration angsts ever onwards, I get less and less invested.

Still, I'd give this a very solid 4/5. Worth your time if not a position in the library.

 

I've been reading this on SB, and storybookknight does a pretty good job of keeping everyone in character. Or if he's off on the Oreigaru side, I can't tell the difference.

For reference, Bakugo is both in character, and definitely not bashed. Which, I know is a low bar, but a pretty big problem with a lot of BnHA fandom.

On the Quirk side, I think the new Quirks introduced and their interpretation is pretty good.

I'd give this a 4/5.

 

I'm really struggling to enjoy this. The character writing for Hikigaya is on point, but hampered by excessive internal diatribes and monologues. That's the Oregairu style, sure, but it's a delicate balance which this stomps all over with walls of text.

A lot of attention is being given to his quirk, but that's not really a good thing. I'm horrified to hear myself say that. I normally love a deep look at the fantastical elements of a setting, but this is bogged down by an anal focus on the mechanics without much experimentation or action for us to watch. Hikigaya barely does anything with his quirk in comparison to the amount of time he spends talking about it. We see the same in all character interactions; they're summarised and skimmed over in favour of Hikigaya rambling.

Is that canon compliant? To some extent. But it dominates the fic in a bad way, making it slow and monotonous reading.

There are some really good moments as well. The way that Hikigaya got past the hero exam was inspired and fitting. His fears around All Might are relevant to his suspicious nature and the way people tend to look down on him for being a shady fuck.

Unfortunately this is hampered at every turn by the writing not being interesting or entertaining. It's not like it's full of errors. It just isn't fun to read.

2.5/5

 

I think I have to disagree with Otters here. I really like this story because I found it so fun to read.

It merges both series in a way that really enhances them both. I like Oregairu but I'm not actually that big a fan of the genre and find it occasionally a bit dull. The characters are my favourite thing from it and this ports them over nicely.

The My Hero Academia plot is great and I love the setting, plus I generally am a big fan of shonen action. However I do sometimes find some of the characters a little one dimensional? The way it sometimes steamrolls through the events in the series leaves little time to develop the massive cast and means some of them have fallen by the wayside.

So by my reckoning this story has taken the best bits from both series and fused them into an amazing mix. Everyone from both sides of the crossover is in character in so far as I can tell. It's given some of the MHA cast more time to shine and features one of the only well written Bakugo's that I've seen, where he's still an ass but a more likeable one?

There are issues but I view them as minor in the grand scheme of things. There are occasional mistakes but nothing massively egregious. The main problem which I could see annoying people is it does have a minor case of "spacebattle-itus". It occasionally focuses on certain minutia which could really be skimmed over but i do think it works here for adding to the voice of Hachiman. I enjoyed it, but I could see it annoying people.

It's probably because I just read it and enjoyed it much more than anything else that has been recommend to me in the MHA fandom but overall I'd give it 5/5. I'm probably going to reread this sometime soon.

 

I had a really good time reading this story. I think it absolutely nailed Hachiman's blend of paranoia, cynicism, and lack of self-esteem. Reading from this perspective can often be a drag, but this story does a great job interspersing enough light-hearted moments to keep it enjoyable. I actually laughed out loud quite a few times.

There were a few things that bothered me. The main plot of BnHA plays out with minor divergences, except the roles played by the original cast are played by Oregairu characters instead. It feels quite weird to have Midoriya in the story, but in the background of scenes he should have had a major role in.

I found some of Hachiman's thought processes hard to follow. Convoluted thought processes are undoubtedly at least partially intentional, but I still think they could have been depicted a bit better in the writing. In particular, I didn't quite grasp what Hachiman was thinking as he waffled back and forth between sticking with the Hero course or not.

I don't know if I've read any stories where Hachiman is actually well-respected and popular to the extent depicted in this story. I think for the most part it worked here, and I think this makes this fairly unique for the oregairu fandom.

Aside from my minor complaints, I thought this was a great story. Easy 4/5 from me.

 

Can I follow this without knowledge of MHA?

 

It follows fairly close to the plot beats of the anime / manga, but you might get a bit dazed withe various characters.

 

The MHA characters dont really get much of an introduction apart from Midoriya and Bakugo so I found it hard to keep them apart or picture them at all really.

That said, not knowing the MHA plot means all plot in this fic is new to me, so maybe it balances out. I enjoyed this story, but Im a sucker for the super-high-school fics and also liked Oregairu quite a bit. The prose is fine, but I could have done with less description of the exact combinations and percentages of Hachiman’s 108 powers.

3,5/5 rounded up.

 

I really enjoy this story, I like both Oregairu & BNHA as stand-alone properties, and I like the fusion that the author has woven together. I like Hachiman as a character, and his interactions with both the BNHA characters and the Oregairu imported characters in the BNHA setting.

Unfortunately, the storybookknight made two very bad meta decisions:
1) He made the the main characters power quantifiable in some way, i.e. in the story, Hachiman is able to copy other peoples superpowers, at 1/108 effectiveness. Later on, Hachiman is able to increase this ratio upwards to make the copied superpowers more effective.
2) The power itself is a power-copying power.

These are not bad by themselves, but it becomes poison when Spacebattles is introduced to the mix. The autists over at Spacebattles have spent over 4000 posts of feedback/discussion obsessing over power-stacking, power-min-maxing, power-this-and-power-that. I guarantee that is why, as others reviewers have noted, the narrative has become unbalanced in a negative way with too many words spent on mechanics that clog up the story. The author is giving the readers what they want, whether knowingly or subconsciously. Inane power-mechanics taken to the extreme.

I can understand that how exactly Hachiman's power work is a key part of the story, one of his main character beats is how he is figuratively working himself to death to be a hero, which is directly at odds with his internal monologue (i.e. because Hachiman lying to himself is a defining trait).

It's not to say that this is a bad story. As noted, I really enjoy it, but I feel like the aforementioned preoccupation with the power-mechanics drags on.

4/5, less power-mechanics, more clusterfuck please.

 

This is an enjoyable read for me, 4/5 it's a good blending of the genre's and while it's adding scenes into the plot to make it different the plot shifting has been minor so far.

I find the hard magic system added by Hachiman's quirk to be interesting, it does clog the story a bit; but I feel it adds more to the story than it takes away.

 

Haven't read the fic yet, but I need to rant.

Shounen isn't action/adventure, just the target demographic based on a magazine the manga is published in.
Quintessential Quintiplets is shounen, Silent Voice is shounen, Mix is shounen, Welcome to the Ballroom is shounen, Encouragement of Climb is shounen.

 

Common definition usually references both action and adventure thus instead of leaving it vaguely based on demographic alone I clarified. Rant about your investment to chinese cartoon tags added in jest elsewhere if you really have to get how much of an expert you are off your chest.

I’d say, even worse than Transdim ever was, this story is kind of predicated on having seen at least MHA. Should have mentioned this in the negatives originally but a great many aspects of the main plot beats and characters of MHA go unexplained and undescribed because of this. While there is a certain benefit to going in blind, the author definitely doesn’t account for that possibility.

I also feel a little remiss in not mentioning my problems with the writer’s tendency to get bogged down in quirk mechanics as a direct result of forum interaction but I folded it into a bland statement about the writing being uninteresting.

 

This is a decent MHA fic, if a bit on the fix-it side, with some decent exploration of Hachiman's quirk, complete with the shonen asspull's, but it's missing the one vital ingredient that a good Oregairu crossover needs. And that is the 8man himself. The author completely misses the mark on Hachiman's character, pathetically reduced to just echoing a couple of lines from the show and a few terms, while completely missing the actual characterization.

I'll give it a 2/5 for being well written, but completely missing the shot on the one aspect of Oregairu that he's basing the crossover around. Good Oregairu crossovers with Hachiman being the only link have been done before. It's possible, but this isn't it.

Edit: Case in point, this fic is about the opposite of this one. That one is sloppily written, but it nails Hikigaya's voice. I'd read that one over this twice over.

 

This is an interesting take, but I think there are some points of contention. For one, I can’t say what exactly you’re basing the missed every mark of his characterization on since you gave no examples. If I were to argue the point for you, I would say that the biggest problem I have with the story is the setup of how he gets into UA, which is to say that I enjoyed the opening essay and it is suitably backwards but I can’t see Hikigaya not hating pro heroes at a base level. In addition, like with most fanfictions, the author uses the Hachiman he’s read up until this point as a basis instead of the Hachiman that would be just starting to develop, resulting in a more confident and forthright character than he was for most of his own canon.

Which brings me to point number 2, Transdim is a fun fic that has clearly spawned an entire genre of what is essentially 8man insert crossover fics but to say that that fic captures his character better with worse writing is a little strange. I’d say that because the writing is worse in this story, the voice is worse. I’d attribute a dissonance for you in characterization to this failed voice due to the rather drab prose that either fails to or doesn’t attempt to match the Oregairu style of narration the same way Transdim does, because otherwise his actions are all either lifted from his canon or what I would consider to be perfectly in line with his established character if not done with more maturity than you’d expect season 1 8man to ever have.

Now the combat writing I’d say is better here than the very clumsy approximation of practically super computer level thought in Transdim, but when it comes to writing the slice of life side it triumphed over this fic pretty thoroughly. I still wouldn’t consider Transdim a complete triumph in characterization as there are too often memetic references to source material like the overused Saika/Zaimo lines, and more over I think the premise of the fic is flawed as if he had been transported there with that message I think he’d naturally assume he was the protagonist instead of searching for one, but overall the narration sounded right. Further more, his ‘place’ or ‘archtype’ or whatever that he chose for himself made for a decent dynamic but was about as much of a leap in character writing as anything in this fic. So I guess I can’t say I disagree with you about the fix it overtones but I am a little confused on everything else.

 

I'll thank you not to attribute things for me.

It has nothing to do with the bland prose and everything to do with the fact that this bizarro-Hachiman, fun as he may be to follow and watch tackle challenges with his OP quirk, is not Hachiman. Not in any way that matters, not in any actions. He occasionally echoes Hachiman in thoughts or when characterizing other people to himself, but that is meaningless when his actions are nothing at all like what Hachiman does or would do.

But he doesn't. That's the thing. He says he does, but has never shown this in action, and this is basically written away after he joins the school. He's not in situations similar to Hachiman, he doesn't talk or react like Hachiman, his situation at no point echoes anything from the show (aside from the accident) that made watching Hachiman deal with things interesting. He's not called to solve similar problems. Bizarro-8man is not a cynical, anti-social, perceptive loner. He's more Hayama than the actual in-story Hayama, and that's hilarious as well as sad.

It's the typical indie tropes of everyone stopping to stare and appreciate as the protagonist pulls all the answers out of his bottomless ass.

The one thing I'll admit is that I really enjoyed the essay, though it went to some weird directions. Much as I enjoyed it, it doesn't take incredible skill to adapt an existing essay to fit the setting, and the beliefs lose relevancy instantly.

As for Transdim, I tended to just skip the fight scenes. That fic has a lot of issues. Hachiman's voice is not one of those issues, but this thread is not for Transdim.

 

Yes, I said that was my biggest problem with the fic as a whole.

Some of this is perfectly valid, but there are some more things I can't agree with. For instance, I can only assume (again I'm not trying to put words in your mouth but when you speak vaguely I try to fill in the gaps) the majority of what you'd consider out of character actions as those that I've also had a problem with, the fix it hallmarks where Hachiman just happens to fix Midoriya's OFA problem before he even faces Bakugo for the first time, and the unsatisfyingly brief summation of an entire season of Oregairu where he just goes and shakes Yuigahama's hand to clear the whole thing up. All of these are out-going, confident, socially aware actions that conflict hideously with season 1 Hikigaya. Even by the end of season 2 you'd be pretty pressed to sell that as 'in character.' Even his understanding with Bakugo, which is cool and all, still speaks to a much more socially acclimated person.

However, I don't think the majority of his actions reflect this same lazy fix-it template. His actions in the exam process worked, his actions in the quirk test worked, his actions didn't hold up well with the first hero course training as mentioned above, his actions for the heart request mirrored canon detrimentally so while it was in character it was also a very bizarre scene to carry over, him being elected class president was retarded but set up by the previously mentioned fix it garbage from the earlier scene, his actions before, at, and after the USJ all worked in story but I'm not happy about either little 'speech' he gave or how the narrative handled them but that is probably the most 'indie' it gets for me.

While I can certainly see where you're coming from, and have many similar reservations about the narrative which I too mentioned vaguely above, I don't think this really is as bizarro-Hachiman as you're saying. Just some lazy writing with the occasional grandstanding you see in lesser quality work. Can definitely be both lazy writing and out of character and I'd say one follows the other 9/10 times. I enjoyed this fic but it has problems, as better enunciated above.

 

It is an interesting story and I have a lot of the same problems that were already echoed in this thread. It is a meh take on Hachiman and too much bullshittery with regards to powers. The 108 powers each at a fraction thing is bleh, but that is a more personal thing.

On the other hand, I do applaud the decision to make this a fusion rather than a crossover. I do not give a shit about more than half of the MHA cast, so having them be replaced by the far superior Oregairu cast was very welcome. They are similarly not handled all that great but even light versions of them are enjoyable and I will say that Bakugou joining the service club is a brilliant idea on paper, even if the execution left something to be desired.

So yeah, it is a fun enough time waster and I even reread the story recently, so despite its flaws and shortcomings, I am still mostly having a good time. More Hachiman wank than I would like but I prefer something like this to all the stories who only take Hachiman and insert him into another setting without the other Oregairu characters, without whom Hachiman just doesn't work, imo. Or at least, it becomes wank way easier as they then just set him up as the "is always cynically right" guy, which isn't really the case.

Am also a bit tired of crossover Hachiman blaming his nerdy friend for all the shitty tropes he encounters. Like the first time I saw that, it was kinda cute, but since every other crossover milks this joke, just rolling my eyes now. So am glad this story doesn't do that.

Gonna give this a very generous 4/5