pitviperofdoom:

So it’s been way long since I got this ask but I just HAD to draw it and I finally got around to it so

Presenting… YUTSwap!

Her real name isn’t Rei, of course; in fact, in this version of things, little Izuku is the one who gets dubbed Rei; he doesn’t talk and seems to have a bit of a memory problem, so he’s never told her his real name. But for the sake of clarity and avoiding spoilers for normal YUTS I’ll just call them Not!Rei and Izuku.

Not!Rei isn’t the universal ray of sunshine that Deku is; I wouldn’t necessarily call her bitter, but she does tend to default to thinking the worst of people unless she’s given reason to believe otherwise. This gives her a bit of a selfish, judgmental streak, and she doesn’t often put herself out there for people she doesn’t know. in fact, left to her own devices she probably wouldn’t have thought of becoming a hero in the first place, but she just had to go and befriend an adorable hero-obsessed ghost boy when she was seven. He’s followed her around ever since, exhorting her to make selfless decisions and help people and basically being her own personal Jiminy Cricket. It’s his influence that gets her to put the effort into being more understanding and helpful and, dare I say, heroic.

Case in point, at her first Sports Festival:

Luckily, it doesn’t take too much to change her mind, and when she does latch on to people, she’ll go to the ends of the earth for them. It’s still selfishness on her part, though, since she’ll only do that for people and things she cares about. I imagine she struggles with it until she has sort of a Tiffany-Aching-esque “Then make all things yours” realization.

(Over the course of the Sports Festival her opinion of Todoroki evolves from “wow what pompous ass” to “I’ve only been his friend for five minutes but if anything happened to him I would kill everyone in this room and then myself.”)