Chapter Text
Izuku has made an online blog, and it was probably the best and worst decision he ever made. Both good and bad at the exact same time.
He couldn't even tell why it went so far.
How it went so wrong yet so right.
Creating videos started out as a simple way for him to categorize and break down his ramblings into something more understandable to an average person. Any information he tried to convey before that was all over the place, connected in ways only Izuku could understand.
It was impossible to share his analysis when no one could understand it, so he had to work on that.
And if people on the internet decided that those stupid hero analysis videos he made as practice were worth a watch, then, well, why not share?
The main and most important reason, however, was his mother. Inko kept insisting that being a hero was a job too dangerous for him, and he shouldn’t even think about being one. Kept insisting that he was delicate, weak, that he should do something else with his time than focus on heroics.
All of it purely because he was quirkless.
Instead of letting him pursue his passion, she pushed him to try many different hobbies that never stuck to him, hoping that something would interest him enough to keep him “safe”.
First, his mom tried to get him into photography, back when he was barely able to hold a camera with tiny, shaky hands. To her disappointment though, instead of running after butterflies and taking photos of pretty flowers, Izuku - with his sheer stubbornness - somehow managed to keep getting way too close to hero fights for her liking. His constant attempts to take photos of heroes any time that his mother looked away ended up pretty badly when she found all the hero photos he kept.
Inko ended up burning everything that he wasn’t able to hide anywhere.
It made him cry for days, even if she tried to apologize with gifts afterwards. Chocolate and candy did not fix the problem, but the boy appreciated that at the very least she tried to make it better.
Then came drawing, but all the art Izuku made was of heroes - tracing photos he sneakily hid all around the room. This one lasted long beyond what she agreed on, and even when his painting canvas had been taken, he kept sketching in his notebooks with nothing but pencils and his own imagination.
Izuku liked to believe he got quite good at drawing over time.
Next idea she had was music lessons, but he hated those with a burning passion. He was about eight by that time, yet his teacher treated him pretty badly, even for quirkless student standards.
In their mind, he was supposed to be the new Mozart, and if he didn't meet those expectations then it must mean he was absolutely worthless, worse than the dirt people walk on. Sure, now he knew how to play exactly two songs on a guitar, how amazing, but it was never really interesting to him, especially with his teacher’s attitude dulling any remaining passion for playing instruments. Thankfully his mom listened to him back then, and allowed him to back away from the lessons after he asked nicely and promised to be better next time.
The next idea she tried to push onto him was engineering and programming, which he found quite interesting, but not enough to stop purposefully seeking out heroes in his spare time. There was just so much he could do when he had access to the internet and a person willing to help him with anything he asked.
The teacher he had for that class was actually quite nice!
It was a friendly older man who had a quirkless daughter, so he was one of those people that treated Izuku better than the rest of the world. The man even talked to him about his family quite often.
The teacher’s daughter was in her late twenties, and she liked to give him candy whenever they met - as well as try to motivate him to keep on going, as she knew how bad the discrimination against quirkless was - so all in all, it was great.
Those were definitely the best classes he ever took, and he learned way more than most people would expect! His teacher had nothing against telling him how to do anything he asked about despite the fact those questions were not a part of the standard lesson plan.
Which was how he ended up knowing how to hack into city cameras to watch heroes in his spare time, thanks to some useful - although slightly illegal - advice from the older man.
When his mom found out what he did, however, she banned him from those lessons as well, which was pretty annoying. She even got angry at the teacher for “putting him in danger” and didn’t listen to anything the man tried to say as she dragged Izuku away, and Izuku felt absolutely terrible having to cut all contact with the nice family of his teacher.
He felt awful about it all for days afterwards, sulking around the house and staying in his room for days on end without talking to his mom. The lack of internet access hurt the most, as he couldn’t even learn on his own anymore. Of course she made sure to tell him about how much it was for his own good, which made him feel bad for simply feeling bad. It got bad enough to make him let his mother seek out a new “hobby” for him.
That minor inconvenience, however, did not mean that he stopped developing his engineering and programming skills on his own - he already knew enough to learn the rest without any help the moment his mother let him have access to the internet again. Even if he no longer had a qualified teacher giving him advice and materials to use, he still developed his skills further with whatever he was able to get his hands on, trash or not.
Cooking lessons, astronomy lessons, making him volunteer in a pet shelter, even dancing lessons were all abandoned pretty quickly as well, as none of it really interested him, only wasting his time and distracting him from what he truly wanted to do.
There was nothing Izuku could do about it though, so he always went to the first few meetings to make his mom happy. Sometimes he even kept attending some classes for longer than he planned because she seemed so happy seeing him try them out, so how could he possibly refuse? How could he be an awful son and make her sad? He abandoned them only when he started feeling miserable there - for example, this was his story with cooking. His mother made him cook so often both during lessons with others and at home that eventually he began to despise doing so. Sure, he was good at it, but that didn’t mean he liked it. So after a few months of begging and promising he won’t try to be a hero anymore he managed to stop her from making him go to those lessons as well.
No hobby she picked actually stuck to him, other than, well, technically programming, but his mother was very against that after she found out about the little camera incident, so he had to be secretive about it ever since.
Anything that he was actually interested in was forbidden because it was somehow related to heroes - like, even going to the gym was seen as an absolutely terrible idea by his mom because Izuku was “oh so fragile” and she was scared he would break or something.
Or maybe try to use his skills to actually become a hero one day. Not that she even believed he could be strong enough to do that.
Recording videos was just the last attempt at finding him something new to do. Izuku knew that he was probably supposed to take videos of things like a pair of dogs playing in the rain or record the sunset, but then again, nothing was really interesting enough in those ideas to keep his attention.
No.
Instead, he decided to make a blog to post videos with his analysis, sharing his true passion with the world.
With people who could actually understand him.
Of course, it was analysis on heroes and quirks . Which his mom technically did not approve of, but when she was at work she couldn’t really stop him.
What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her, right? And shouldn’t hurt him either as long as she never finds out.
So there he was, starting his career at the age of thirteen, making videos with his screen completely black, (he wasn’t stupid enough to show his face on the internet, of course) Izuku rambled for hours about heroes whenever his mother was away.
He always tweaked the audio, making it sound much more robotic through some rather amateur code and programs, just so it would be impossible to figure out his age or gender.
Anything that could possibly be used against him was removed from the videos for safety reasons, so he saw nothing wrong in sharing them.
His mom, after all, drilled into his head from a young age that everyone on the internet wanted to hurt him and that they were all villains in disguise or something, even if it wasn’t true.
...Okay, maybe there were some villains, but surely not every second person who was browsing the internet was bad, right?
Right?
That was basically how his “career” started, maintaining a blog on some random blogging website and posting his analysis both in video form and short descriptions underneath. He also kept posting random messages like “hello everyone! :D I hope your day is going alright! ^-^” literally every. Single. Day.
At first there wasn’t much attention under his blog, but hey! It might’ve taken a bit of time, but after a few months, people were already commenting under his good morning messages!
It was probably because someone more popular noticed one of his posts and decided to share it along, but hey, he wasn’t going to say no to that sudden jump in followers. It was exciting!
Five months into his blogging adventure Izuku got used to people calling him the robot-voice quirk analyst, or sometimes shadow quirk analyst because all of his videos had a pure black background while he talked. And in all honesty, he would rather be called the shadow quirk analyst because robot voice just… Sounded very bad.
Yeah, sure, he edited his voice to sound robotic, but they didn’t have to point it out!
Even at this age he knew that it sounded like a truly terrible name to have, especially when you start getting more popular - the longer changing it afterwards gets harder and harder with time. So he made a post where he allowed people to call him a shadow quirk analyst, and wrote that he thought about changing the blog name.
After all, his blog name was pretty bad. It was called “quirk analysis for future” like his notebooks, which did not sound like a good blog name anymore.
People immediately rushed into the comments under it suggesting a bunch of different names, which he truly appreciated. He made sure to respond to every one, although he got nervous at all that attention and all those great ideas. He didn’t want to disappoint people, but those ideas were… They were good, and maybe too good for him to use.
What if they got angry at him for using their ideas after they realize it all went to a useless, quirkless nobody?
In the end, the idea he wanted to use was “Shadow Analysis”, and it wasn’t entirely by vote, but more because Izuku got terrified of using the majority of the ideas that people gave him. By vote, technically, the name “Umbra Voice” won.
Apparently, “umbra” was some scientific name for a part of a shadow, so it was actually pretty clever considering what his videos looked like, but he got scared that using it could end up in a lawsuit because it wasn’t his idea. Someone else gave him that idea, so it technically didn’t actually belong to him. What if they got angry at him for using it, even if they gave him the idea in the first place?
…
...Okay, so he might’ve eventually ended up with the UmbraVoice name despite his previous choice.
But only because people started posting hate comments directed at him for saying that he would use shadow analysis while the name that was the most voted one by his little community was thrown out, and shadow analysis was at the bottom of the list. He didn’t react well to all those comments, as they made him cry and panic silently for about an hour before agreeing just so they would leave him alone.
Not that he would actually admit that they made him cry, of course. Izuku didn’t want them to know that he was acting like a baby when not recording.
With his new blog name in place he got even more attention, his community exploding at the change and definitely happy with having a name behind the videos. With it came even more people asking him for a face reveal, which was yet another thing that made him freak out.
He wasn’t ready to show his face, it was dangerous! But everyone insisted...
Should he?
While mindlessly scrolling down some costume ideas and aesthetically pleasing videos, he came across a person showing a tutorial on how to become a shadow for a video. No quirk usage required. Which immediately made a lightbulb light up in his head.
Opening a popular website for online shopping, Izuku searched for any glowing objects that did not cost a fortune. He picked out a cheap colorful mouth light that looked decent and could let him show the world that he was speaking to them and added it to the cart. It definitely made it more personal than just sitting in front of the camera with a pre-recorded voice put under it without the need for anyone to see his face.
He also got gloves that glowed soft green just enough to be visible but not enough to light him up and reveal any personal information. Other than this he experimentally got some glowing green paint and glowing yellow headphones. For the background, he bought some green tree lights, or christmas lights, whatever they were even called.
When everything arrived a few days later, Izuku was practically bouncing with excitement, unable to contain his giddiness.
He told his mom that they were for aesthetic photography when she asked, of course .
She wouldn’t be too happy if she knew what he ended up doing instead, therefore he had to lie about it.
Then, Izuku cleaned off a corner of his room from most of the hero merch, and it made him feel silly for owning so much of it. It would be terribly embarrassing if the entire world knew how much of a fanboy he was.
Sure, it was a much smaller amount than what he wished for anyway, as his mom was very disappointed in him every time he picked up anything hero related in the shops and regularly told him to sell those useless toys. He wasn’t a baby anymore, after all.
That was probably another reason he was self conscious about what small of a collection he still had.
His mom always looked vaguely upset when she came into the room, making sure to sigh loudly every time she looked at the posters. Every time Izuku felt a pang of guilt for making her sad, anxiety creeping up at the back of his throat, making him think - what if one day he came back and all his All Might merch was gone?
Either way, the way Inko reacted to them made Izuku feel bad about even owning those few in the first place, so of course he didn’t want anyone to know.
Then, he put the green lights over the walls with some clear tape and made sure it all worked. He also went through all of his other purchases and tested them to make sure there would be no accidents during recording.
His clothes were, well, his usual clothes, but with the glowing bits added on. He might’ve accidentally added bunny ears to the headphones while trying to imitate All Might’s hair, but they only added more personality to his general look, so he drew a few circles on them with the glowing paint and kept them on despite the slight embarrassment. If anything, a shadow bunny was more interesting than just a normal figure sitting in a dark room. This way, people could know it was him when he was recording.
Another thing he used the paint for was accenting the largest freckles on his cheeks, so that they were glowing in the dark and adding even more personality to him past just “a shadow person.”
Next, he put on the gloves and the mouth light. The light was tricky, as he choked on it quite a few times while trying to find a way to work around it and speak without swallowing it by accident. Apparently, talking with it on was really hard unless he stuck it to the sides of his mouth, which was much better than what people recommended when he got it. Others apparently didn’t really talk with those. So that had to be expected.
Even with the mouth lights in their new positions, he still had to re-learn how to talk again without choking constantly.
At some point he even wondered how badly it would end if he accidentally swallowed them with batteries still inside, but he quickly pushed the thought out of his head. He had no time for worrying.
And this was how he made his first video a few hours later, when it finally became dark enough outside to stop any light from peeking through the curtains. After checking that everything worked multiple times, he flicked off the light, turned on the darkest settings his camera had, and walked in front of the camera.
After checking once again to see for sure that he was only a “shadow” of a person and his face, clothes, and literally everything past the glowing parts were completely black and blending in with the darkness, he began talking.
The video lasted fifteen minutes, where he went in-detail about some new hero’s fairy quirk, and only about thirty seconds at the beginning were of him explaining his new outfit and new way of making videos.
Damn, now it made him realize that they would all take so much longer to make, and he’d have to record them all at night, but that was a sacrifice he was willing to make for the comfort of his viewers.
Thankfully his mom began taking night shifts much more than the daytime ones as they paid much more, so she was away for most of the time that Izuku was able to record.
Izuku was not stupid, though, and he was fully aware that the main reason behind the sudden change and need for more money was most likely her need to send him to new random lessons and get him away from heroes. As well as monitor him during the day to make sure that he, god forbid, was not sneaking out to watch heroes. So he was mostly in the clear, as long as he stuck to doing it at night.
Therefore, his filming was not disturbed in any way, and he could safely record, edit and post it in peace.
Everything worked out great, and the views blew up overnight way more than he ever expected. It was terribly overwhelming, the amount of attention he gained overnight leaving him anxious about his future and doubting his decisions. All the comments and likes made him fidgety and caused him to shake like a cube of jello in the wind as he watched the numbers rise.
He was extremely relieved that he actually decided to hide himself in the shadows and not let anyone see his face, hiding anything past his silhouette and some glowing accessories, because he knew that if anyone online actually knew his face he would most likely pass out.
Besides, if his classmates somehow found his blog, they would never let him live that down, and his career would be destroyed.
Therefore, for safety, he preferred to stay in the shadows.
Even if his mother by any chance found his blog in the current state, she would technically have no evidence that it was him, right?
The attention and comments under his new video, while supportive, made his anxiety shoot through the roof as his brain screamed that it might’ve been a big, big mistake. Running his fingers through his hair for the thousandth time, he stared at his computer screen, totally stressed out.
He tugged more at his hair, wincing as he felt some hair rip in the process, but that didn’t soothe his worries at all. What was done was done, however, and so many people saw the video and shared it around that deleting it would do more harm than good.
That still didn’t change the fact he might or might not have experienced a panic attack after his view count hit over 50 thousand overnight with everyone sharing it around. Which was multiple times more than the usual number and it just kept rising .
All night he couldn’t get any sleep, as every time he tried to close his eyes anxiety kept opening them again, his brain unable to keep them shut. He checked the comments and the view count many times during the night, and freaked out for hours until the sun had finally passed the horizon and it was the time to go to school.
He barely managed to scrub the green paint off his cheeks in time to go to school as he had forgotten about it until he looked into the mirror in the morning, half an hour before he had to leave. He ended up missing breakfast thanks to that, but at least no one would make fun of him for having neon green paint on his face.
Ever since then, he made sure to make videos of his analysis at least once a week, and after three more months he had finally gotten used to it enough not to feel extremely awkward while doing so. People seemed to like his analysis, and being praised for it felt like a drug that he couldn’t get enough of.
It was exciting, as he felt like he had any worth for the first time in his life. Pure happiness rushed through his veins every time he read the comments, allowing him to forget about his miserable existence for at least a little bit.
Every time someone asked him for help with their quirk, for any tips that they could use to improve and have a chance at being a better hero, he was filled with such pride and excitement it made up for everything else he had to deal with in his life.
At the age of fourteen he already had a huge following and a lot of people theorizing about his possible quirk, which made him feel slightly disappointed, the barely hidden sadness settling itself down in his gut. Of course no one would assume he was quirkless.
It made him wonder if they would still like him after they found out.
Probably not.
He also updated his costume after quite some time of being stuck with his old one (and maybe choking on the mouth lights one too many times, causing him to spend more time editing the videos than he would like).
Instead, he used the skills that he got from engineering classes that his mom made him go to as a child - and which he went to for an entire year before the camera accident and being banned from both engineering and programming - to build his own accessories.
Which were definitely much easier and more comfortable to use.
The new mouth lights were much smaller, and could actually be stuck to his teeth in a similar way to how braces worked, making them much more comfortable to wear and talk in. It took him an awfully long time to fit all of the inner mechanics of the accessory into something small enough it could work like how he wanted it to, but eventually he managed to do that without creating anything overly dangerous, praying to whatever deity was out there that it wouldn’t explode in his mouth.
The metal ears were also replaced into robotic ones which he could actually move - even if only back and forth in one direction - and they made him incredibly happy. The moment he saw they worked, he couldn’t contain his giggles of happiness as he bounced around the room, letting them twitch robotically in response. Oh and he also finally found glowing paint that didn’t take half an hour to wash off! It didn’t irritate his skin as much, either!
Which.
All of that brought us to the current moment, when Izuku was fourteen - but almost fifteen, of course!
And his follower count was at about 53k, which was, wow, a lot.
It was a cold January night he had planned to spend going over the quirk of some new hero. Pretty quickly he had finished scripting everything, changing his previous notes into something more presentable, and it was time to record.
Putting on the “costume,” if it could even be called that, he turned off the light and started the recording before sitting in front of the camera on a spinning office chair that his mom bought him at some point. It almost made him feel like one of those cartoon hacker villains that turn around in the spinning chair with their hands together to greet the heroes.
He didn’t see himself as a villain, of course, but it was a funny observation either way.
“Good evening, everyone! Umbra Quirk Analyst here, and I’m here to talk about one of the newer heroes, SilenTrack! She might’ve debuted barely a month ago, but so many people are already speaking about her and her explosive music themed appearance, even if her quirk is completely unrelated! First things first, however, is that I found some things about her past that are not too pleasant,” he started, grabbing the light-up whiteboard he used when he needed to write down information beforehand. He always made sure to look through the background of any hero he talked about, and if he found any dirt on them - be it by known sources, internet sources or straight up hacking - and seemed to have made no effort to fix themselves, he talked about what they had done.
His habit of making sure heroes were who they say they were had probably stemmed from his mother telling him a lot of horror stories about abuse of power when he was younger in an attempt to make him dislike them. A lot of them seemed fake though, so he assumed they were created purely to scare him. The only thing this accomplished, however, was that he appreciated those heroes that were still good people even more.
There was only so much they could get away with and no one would care, and yet, they didn’t use that power.
“When we look at her story, she has a lot of charges of stalking and assault, which got completely overlooked because, one, she is a woman, and two, and no one wanted to destroy her hero career thanks to her useful quirk, which I have evidence for and am going to post underneath this video along with all the sources and evidence. Now, time for the quirk analysis!”
He never liked destroying people’s trust in heroes, as he wasn’t stupid and knew it only attracted villains, but he couldn’t just not mention the fact that those people not only have done a lot of bad things, but they were also let off with basically no consequences.
Half an hour later he stopped the recording and dragged himself to his desk, rubbing his tired eyes as the computer lit up the moment he turned the screen back on. Turning on the lamp, he squinted at the long video before sighing and sighing and starting the painfully long process of editing it.
He got used to making videos the moment it got dark and spending a long time editing them during the night so his mom wouldn’t find out. So naturally, his sleep schedule was awful, making him barely get any sleep between school and his analysis blog, but he could deal with it. He had dealt with worse than sleep deprivation.
Yawning, he finished in about an hour, as naturally his videos didn’t have too much to change. He just had to watch it to make sure there were no mistakes, adjust the lighting in some places, and cut off a few things so it looked finished and clean.
Posting it on his blog, he stared blankly at the screen for about ten minutes before finally refreshing the page to check if anyone had written anything. It was a fifteen minute long video, but some people always commented instantly the moment new videos appeared before even watching them, despite the late hour they were posted at.
Most spoke up about knowing the hero or being the first one to comment, but there was one person who said they hoped that Umbra had something to say about her creepy personality and criminal activity, as they’d been affected by the hero and wished that more people could help them in their current situation.
Which was one of the main reasons Izuku was ready to share the fact that heroes were not all pure and shiny to the world despite the harm it did to his reputation in the eyes of hero-lovers. So people like that one person could find justice more easily instead of silently suffering, forever forgotten.
With time more and more comments flooded in as he logged off and made his way to his bed, hastily scrubbing off the paint with a napkin. Taking off the outside piece of the mouth lights he put them in a box, throwing out the thin plastic layer over it that was used so the accessory in itself wouldn’t be dirty all the time. After getting rid of his costume pieces Izuku let himself fall onto the bed, ignoring the way his green curls stung when they got into his eyes as all he had in mind was sleep.
It welcomed him nicely, as always, but the bliss of unconsciousness was over far too soon for his comfort.
Izuku didn’t dream, he never really did, so the moment of rest was over pretty quickly as the alarm beeped at him to get up and go to school.
Stretching and feeling his joints pop he knew that today was probably gonna be shitty, as always. He could feel it deep in his bones, and they had spoken up with loud creaking any time he moved from the awful position he had fallen asleep in.
His mouth was dry and he was still tired, but he dragged himself out of bed anyway.
He prepared for the day on autopilot, so the early morning passed by quickly without him even realizing, and pretty soon he was already outside and walking towards his school.
Looking at his phone, Izuku noticed a bunch of new private messages which got him curious. Clicking on the app he checked his dm’s and just as expected, someone had messaged him. And yeah, a lot of people had messaged him lately to get quirk help, but this person seemed to want more than just simple advice from him.
[Lavender] Good morning, I have seen your analysis videos and I wished to ask if you would be willing to take a business offer.
[UmbraVoice] Good morning! And no need to be so formal! ^-^ But when it comes to business offers, I’m not interested in any currently! Sorry!
[Lavender] Ah
[Lavender] Alright, but I still wish to ask if you have ever considered creating a discord server for people following your blog? To connect with the community?
[UmbraVoice] oo! I haven’t really thought about it! But I might do that, so keep an eye out for it in the future ^^’
With that, the conversation ended, leaving Izuku wondering what the offer even was. Damn, he could’ve at least asked before declining. Shrugging it off, he decided to put his phone back in his pocket and keep walking, thinking about the second part - which was making a server.
Well, it couldn’t hurt, right? And it would be an amazing way of keeping up with the not-so-little community he created over the last year and a half!
Yes , he thought to himself, he would make a server tonight.