She doesn’t luck into it; her little hero-obsessed Jiminy-Cricket ghost friend gives her puppy eyes until she does something stupidly heroic enough to catch his attention.
I don’t like to think about Inko in YUTSwap because that way lies nothing but pain, at least until she actually meets Hitomi. There’s a happy ending in store for her, though, because Hitomi just so happens to need a new mom.
In YUTSwap, “Rei” does not have the ability to make himself visible and/or tangible by himself, mainly because his early death stagnated the growth of his quirk. It’s possible for him to figure it out in the future, though! For now, Hitomi’s empathy quirk make it so that she’s the only one who can see and touch him.
Her original parents were… not great. Currently she’s in the foster system, though she’s been bouncing around from home to home ever since she started. Things stabilize a little once she gets into UA, thanks to the existence of student housing. She’s absolutely ecstatic to be there because she hasn’t had her own room since she was three, and growing up effectively being passed from one government-paid babysitter to the next has left her pretty self-sufficient.
So for starters, Izuku is still the one with the ghost quirk in this AU; Hitomi’s quirk is empathy and emotional amplification. Because of this, Izuku ends up with a much stronger and potentially tangible ghost than normal; it’s really only his young age and memory problems that keep him from fully tapping into his postmortem potential. If anything, this gives him the capacity to be even stronger than Rei Classic, freaky screaming and face-melting included. On the other hand, he lacks Rei Classic’s temper and possessiveness, so he’s a lot slower to get angry and try to claw someone’s eyes out.
This sort of renders poltergeists a mute point for Hitomi; since Izuku’s still the one with the ghost sight/enhancing quirk, other ghosts and poltergeists can’t affect Hitomi unless he specifically brings them to her. She can perceive them to a certain extent thanks to her empathy, but she can’t see or hear them, and they can’t hurt her the way they can hurt Izuku.
Ghost Izuku often ends up running to Hitomi when he meets a scary ghost. She gets it, though, and she’ll let him cling until he calms down.
By all means, fic away! That’d be awesome! Hitomi and “Rei” still know sign language to communicate, too.
1) Tsuyu: Best friend, 100% solid badass, 10/10 would partner with in battle.
2) Uraraka: Thought she was a ditz at first, but turns out she is also a badass. Cool friend!
3) Ashido: Another cool friend. Kinda chatty, but hella strong.
4) Iida: Dork. Rules addict. Fun to mess with. Good dude, all around.
5) Todoroki: Huge dork! Friend! Must be protected at all cost!
6) Mineta: Would not piss on him if he were on fire.
7) Kirishima: Nice dude!
8) Bakugou: Asshole. Could be worse, though. At least he’s a quiet asshole.
9) Kaminari: Eh, kinda dumb. Hangs out with #6, severe loss of points there.
10) Sero: Meh.
11) Yaoyorozu: Rich girl, sometimes flaunts richness. Meh.
12) Jirou: No complaints. Very blunt.
13) Aoyama: It would cost him 0$ to shut up so why doesn’t he.
14) Kouda: Quiet. Okay.
15) Satou: Makes… food??
16) Hagakure: Kind of annoying.
17) Ojiro: Why would you leave yourself barefoot. What is the purpose of that, you idiot. you fool.
18) Shouji: Too tall. Who gave him permission to be that tall. Ugh.
19) Tokoyami: Kind of a poser, but it’s mostly amusing.
“Look, I didn’t bust ass getting into this school so I could get trash-talked by a guy who’s a song and dance away from representing the Lollipop Guild.”
I don’t know if any of you remember this AU but it is very much still a thing that I think about sometimes.
Basically YUTSwap is an AU of YUTS in which Rei is the UA student and One For All inheritor, and Izuku is the spooky ghost child who follows her around. Now, to be clear, their quirks are the same; Izuku’s still the one with the ghost quirk, not her. It’s a mixture of Izuku’s ghost quirk and her own empathy quirk that allows her to perceive him. Also, because of circumstances, Izuku is the one who goes by “Rei” (he’s mute and amnesiac the same way Rei is in normal YUTS) while Not!Rei goes by her real name. I didn’t say it in the last post, but the name I’ve picked out for her is Morigawa Hitomi; it doesn’t spoil anything for YUTS proper so there’s really no point in keeping it hush-hush.
I said in the other post that Hitomi… isn’t very nice. It’s not that she isn’t a good person, just that she tends to assume the worst of others, and on top of that she really enjoys messing with people. In spite of this, she manages to befriend Tsuyu, because Tsuyu’s bluntness allows Hitomi absolutely no room to misjudge her. Through her, Hitomi also buddies up with Uraraka and Ashido. Iida’s a bit of a stick-in-the-mud for her taste, but damn if he isn’t fun to mess with.
In spite of her best efforts to be a cynic, “Rei” keeps bugging Hitomi to help people, and has spent the past several years of their friendship bringing her ghosts with unfinished business. It’s gotten her in the habit of doing good for the sake of it, and at least part of the reason why she decides to become a hero is that Rei LOVES heroes, and deep down Hitomi wants to be the kind of person her tiny dead friend would be proud of. Rei’s interventions are also what lead her to attracting All-Might’s attention, and hey! She’d be crazy to turn down an offer like that, right?
Her first impression of Todoroki is…. not a good one. He immediately sticks himself into her mental “stuck-up asshole” box, but luckily for him “Rei” takes notice and spies on him a little (and MAN that little ghost cannot mind his own business) before running to Hitomi and vehemently insisting that her new enemy really just needs help, look you’re the one with the empathy quirk, he’s SAD and LONELY and SCARED come on Hitomi. She’s resistant until a chance meeting with Endeavor, and over the course of the Sports Festival she goes from “would not piss on him if he were on fire” to “why didn’t anyone tell me he’s a big dork okay he’s mine now.”
They form this bizarre inexplicable friendship and honestly Todoroki’s not really sure how it happened either.
Might draw some more for this. I kind of want to try designing Hitomi’s hero costume.
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.”)
Cheloneuniverse 