The rest of the day went by in a kinda haze for Izuku, as the fact that he would actually get to intern under Black cat herself began to truly sink in! The legendary Heroine who had defeated and unmasked the infamous Green Goblin, one of the worst villains the U.S.A had ever produced!
A legendary monster who had been a successful businessman and politician at day, and in secret, been a terrifying menace, equipped with some of the most terrifying gadgets imaginable.
And he was going to get to study under the woman who had defeated him. It was an actual dream come true!
He was in such a good mood that not even Venom sarcastic eye-rolling at his behavior managed to get his spirits down.
Once he finally got home, Izuku had to wait around 3 hours before he got the mail from Black Cat, that Mina had promised.
Being in a Really good mood, Izuku decided he might as well do some research, so he decided to delve into researching both Gran Torino, as well as his two predecessors.
With Gran Torino, Izuku was not able to learn much, him being a rather obscure figure, who had never really dabbled in rankings. Frankly, if you only went by what was on the web, his most notable feature was a truly astonishingly long career, having been a veteran even when All Might had been young.
Though his search for Gran Torino's past had been a failure, he did manage to find the origin of the name Shimura, who as it turned out had been a hero who had often partnered with Gran Torino.
Here, his digging managed to find some interesting details.
In particularity, that Shimura Nana had been married, the husband had been killed by villains at some point, and there might have been a son involved that seemingly disappeared off the written records.
She had then gone MIA and been declared dead around the time of All Might's final school year.
Taken on it's own, Izuku would never have been able to figure out what it all meant, but with what he knew, he was able to make a picture he was pretty sure was somewhat on the money.
Nana Shimura had apparently had a son, who had apparently completely disappeared off the records.
She was also somehow related to Gran Torino, who had taken great pains to train All Might in his final year of school.
And Uraraka for whatever reason respected the woman so much, that she had taken her name as her own hero identity.
With all that in mind, the conclusion that Nana Shimura was All Might's mother, and by extension Uraraka's grandmother wasn't that hard to arrive at.
It made perfect sense.
Feeling rather satisfied that he had uncovered this particular mystery, Izuku decided to move on to reading up on the two previous Spidermen of Japan.
Yamashiro Takuya, Spiderman - The Emissary from Hell, and Komori Yuu, The Amazing Spider-Man.
As he delved into their respective histories, and the history of the name he had chosen for himself, he learned two things. The first was that there had actually been 3 different men who had called themselves spiderman in Japan. The second was that both the Amazing and the Emissary from Hell were rather spectacular examples of Dramatic Irony.
The first Spiderman had been a vigilante during the period leading up to the period where pro heroes became legalized. He had also been known as "Night Monkey" before the greater public had settled on just calling him Spiderman.
There were a couple of videos about the guy floating around the web, but seeing as he had been an outlaw operating during the late collapse period when Japan had just begun to climb back to order and civilization, the fact that there wasn't much information about him wasn't particularly surprising.
He had left one enduring mark on Japan though, as both his successors had essentially just copied his costume, and just replaced the material and recolored it.
The vigilante was the only one of the three that shared Izuku's darker color scheme, whereas the official pro heroes had instead gone with red and blue for their outfits.
The entire thing was a sleek outfit that seemed to be made of pure, dark blue latex, with awesome looking white highlights, that rose above the suit itself in a web-like pattern.
On his chest and back, he had a spider symbol just like Izuku, but whereas Izuku had a giant spider that ran along his torse, and connected to an identical one on his back, this suit's spider was much, much smaller and more subdued.
Hell, even his eyes reminded him of his own suit, though it was obvious that in this case, the white patches were glass lenses of some kind. Not to mention that they were shaped quite differently than his own.
Frankly speaking, if Izuku didn't have an inbuilt suit with his powers, this would probably have been along the lines of the kind of suit he might have designed himself with a spider motif in mind.
After him, there was Yamashiro Takuya, by far the most well documented and remembered of the three.
His suit greatly resembled the one the vigilante Spiderman had used, only in red and blue instead, and instead of probably being made of sleek spandex, it was instead obviously made of only cloth, even the eyes.
There were several notable differences though. The first was that the sleek, stylized spider, had instead been replaced by one that was much more cartoony, essentially just two differently sized black circles, the smaller, on top of the larger one, with very simplistic legs poking out of the sides.
The second was the eyes, which was much more narrow, which, along with the fact it obviously wasn't a lense, but seemingly some kinda cloth, was a hilarious failure at making it look more intimidating.
All in all, Izuku would have described it as rather goofy looking. However, while there were certainly lots of goofy stuff in the life story of the man who had worn it, Yamashiro Takuya was generally a shining example of heroism.
Spiderman, the emissary from hell was a perfect example of what early Japanese pro heroism had been about, which was fitting, as he had become a hero at the exact time when Japan had adopted the pro hero System for their own.
Reading about him, it was kinda hard to figure out whether the man had been a goofball, a serious man who refused to acknowledge the silliness of his costume and the kinda hilarious juxtapose between a man whose official nickname was the emissary from hell, and who proudly proclaimed that one of the most important roles of a hero was to protect and guard children, or something in between.
Either way, he had been surprisingly effective, given the complete mess of an Era he had operated in.
Operating mostly in the western part of Japan, the hero had had quite the career. Operating mostly in the city of Saga, he had battled both the forces of All for One, and the terrorist organization of the Iron Cross Army, a quirk supremacist group who had been bent on subjugation Japan, and on wiping out quirkless humans in favor of the "Superior" new race of humanity.
With a career lasting a whole 41 years, climaxing in a final, fatal confrontation with All for One himself, Yamashiro Takuya might not have been the greatest of the Heroes of the early period, but he was certainly a memorable one.
Reading about him, Izuku was struck by the questions of why he wasn't as well remembered as other big heroes of the age, and why only one other person besides Izuku had ever used the name Spiderman.
He got the answer as he began reading up on Komori Yuu, The Amazing Spider-Man.
Yuu's story… Read like a parody of hero work. Like if someone wanted to make a hero as a cautionary tale where EVERYTHING went wrong, you could not do a more spectacular example than Komori Yuu.
The man's costume had pretty much just been the same as Takuya's, only with different, less goofy eyes. That was where the similarity between the two ended though.
Just starting with regular hero work, the man had jumped straight out into hero work, skipping the sidekick role entirely. And man had he quickly established himself, as a shining example of why sometimes you really should be a sidekick first to learn the ropes. The man had a disturbingly high death rate, and not just in accidentally killing people in self-defense either. The guy had managed to fail to save criminals who fell to their death enough times that the police had done an inquiry into it, one that only seemed to have ultimately fallen through due to an early death.
In particular, there was one quote which really stood out to Izuku during a time he had managed to save a plane from a hijacker crashing it into the skyline. During that incident, the highjacker(Who was apparently flat on insane), had had a moment of lucidity and begged Yuu to save him. His response?
Monsters like you deserve to know what it is like to fear death, and then DIE!
It was as unheroic a quote as you could possibly make, and really had not helped his reputation with the police, especially not with the villains he had failed to save in other circumstances.
Then there were things that weren't really his fault but just added on to a sense of this guy being absolutely cursed.
There had a false accusation of rape after he had saved a girl from being assaulted by a couple of high-school guys, there had been several times when villains had disguised themselves as him to commit crimes. But the most spectacular had been when he had somehow managed to inspire a freaking communist terrorist leader to send an army of guerrilla soldiers to the Caribbean island of Cuba to try and start a revolution.
That had ended in an insane amount of deaths as the entirety of the group he sent had been butchered both by American soldiers stationed there at the time, and the guerilla fighters that had already been active there, and didn't want another faction involved in their then ongoing struggle for a free Caribbean empire.
None of that had been his fault, but damn, was it hard not to feel like he was absolutely cursed.
As Izuku just read about this history, his good mood evaporated and was replaced by complete bafflement, as he wondered how the hell this guy had NOT lost his hero license before he died.
He had been amazing Alright. An amazing example of just how awful life could go for a hero.
And then, of course, there was the final thing. The episode that everyone remembered Yuu for, and the main reason no one had ever touched the name in all the decades since he died.
The goddamned psychic tiger.
Now, innocent people suddenly developing quirks that completely screwed their lives, and the lives around them over on accident were nothing new. Dealing with that kind of tragedy and minimizing the fallout was part of a hero's job.
But rarely did you find a hero who not only failed to make the situation better, but he made it so, so much worse.
The case in question had related to a woman who had suddenly uncontrollably spawned a psychic tiger that was powered by the negative emotions of those around her.
There had been several deaths until Yuu had stumbled into the whole thing trying to help.
The end result had been that the tiger had fed on HIS incredibly negative emotions instead and become ludicrous more powerful, and had gone on a massive rampage, including appearing in a plane and butchering everyone aboard except a father and daughter who had incredible toughness quirks and had survived the plane crash to tell what had happened.
The whole thing had just been a sickening, depressing mess.
And punchline was that Yuu had been found in a room alongside the woman whose quirk had unintentionally caused all of this to begin with. She had been stabbed and had bled to death, while he had seemingly been maimed to death by the tiger, it's final victim.
It was a depressing, ignominious end to a sad, short, depressing life and career that had lasted a whopping 13 months.
The Amazing Spider-Man had been remembered long after his death, just like the Emissary from hell, but for ALL the wrong reasons.
As he finished reading Izuku just lay there, a sense of dread coming over him.
Maybe… Maybe Spiderman hadn't been the best name after all. Though… At least he could take solace in the fact that he could not possibly screw up worse than the Amazing Spider-Man.
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