"I'm not blaming YOU Izuku. I'm blaming the education system, that doesn't even teach you guys about All for One. Can you believe that? The guy effectively ran Japan like it was a fiefdom for over a decade, and there is literally not a SINGLE word about him in the schoolbooks you kids get!"
...
She shook her head.
"Anyway, the reason I'm bringing this up, is that if you really wanna understand the Caribbean League, you need to understand who they are, and where they came from. Cause they go back a LONG time, just as long as All For One. Because just like him, they emerged out of the chaos of when the world was brought to it's knees by the emergence of Quirks."
He nodded. Mina just rolled her eyes.
"Mom really likes being dramatic with her stories."
"This WAS a dramatic time period Mina. It was literally viewed as an apocalypse."
She turned back to Izuku.
"Well… Let me paint a more… Objective picture of the societal collapse that brought the world to it's knees. One that doesn't really skip over the more… Unpleasant details of the period."
She quickly picked up her writing block and Pen, then after flipping, a page, she began scribbling as she talked.
"The first quirk user in history, the famous glowing baby from China, was born on November 4, 2014. And from there, if you were to read Mina's old history Schoolbook, you might be under the impression that quirks just showed up, everything immediately collapsed, and there was chaos until the rise of heroes."
"That's… Not too far off. Back in middle school, we didn't really read much about it, and we mostly focused on history from after the rise of heroes and now…"
"You focus exclusively on it, right? Yeah, I did skim through mina's schoolbook. In any case… That is NOT what actually happened. No, the thing is, that that first generation of quirk users actually had to grow up, before they could start affecting the world. They couldn't exactly bring the entire world to complete collapse while they were still in diapers you know?"
Yeah, that… Made perfect sense really. But Black Cat was right. Their school books did make it seem like quirks had immediately brought about a collapse.
"That first generation had it rough. It had it rough, EVERYWHERE. It had it rough in Asia, it had it rough in Europe, the America's, Africa, and in Oceania. And here's the important part. Quirks… Didn't discriminate. It didn't matter whether you were Black, White, Asian, upper class, lower class, Muslim, Christian, whatever. It didn't care if you were born in a dictatorship under a communist oligarchy or a democratic free republic."
She motioned with the hand she wasn't drawing with, to the side, giving the motion of something large.
"It was spread out, everywhere, on every continent. That… Kinda made what would happen pretty much inevitable."
She sighed again.
"It's… Kinda hard to explain this to you kiddos… You kids who grew up both under All Might watchful shadow, and in homogenous Japan… I don't think you kids can ever truly get the kinda divisions in society that people had back then, and to a large extent, still have to this day."
"Japan is a really homogenous country. It has one overarching culture, predominantly composed of Atheists and your native religion, with Christianity, the second largest religion composing a whopping 9 percent of the total population. And back in the day, it was even more homogenous than it is now."
"The rest of the world… isn't like that. And it was even LESS like that two centuries ago. When quirk users first appeared on the scene, they did in societies that were absolutely brimming with tension, whether it was cultural, ethnic, or religious. Just to give an example, there used to be a kingdom called Spain."
Izuku… Thought he had heard the term Spanish before, though he had never heard of any nation actually called Spain.
"Had a crap ton of different ethnicities, and even before the introductions of quirks there was plenty of tension between the dominant Castilian culture and one of the smaller cultures of the nation."
"Now, imagine this Midoriya. You are one of the very first quirk users. You are born into Spain, you're say… A Catalonian, one of that minority that's at odds with the government. Now, the Castilians that run your country, aren't fond of the ethnic people you're born into, nor are they fond of quirk users at all. There are tons of laws, not just against using your quirks, but against quirk users in general, and people are pushing back against those laws, HARD. Violence happens every day, and every time it happens, the state cracks down on it, harder and harder each time. Without even trying to, your people's quirk users have linked the cause of independence with the question of quirks right. Violence is commonplace, and even amongst the people who support people with quirks, there isn't a set morality that people have agreed on for how quirks should be used."
That… sounded absolutely terrible. Like… For a moment, he imagined if there had been actual laws against quirkless people, not just the way so many people treated them being commonplace.
"Then, suddenly, over in Asia, governments begin debating whether or not Quirk users who have mutation quirks that make them animal-like, or no longer look human should be considered humans."
A chill went up his spine, and his eyes glanced over to Mina.
Black cat noticed it, then nodded.
"You get it, yeah? It's such a stupid idea. There is no way, anyone would actually try and sign that kinda thing into law. Then it happens. And not just totalitarian countries either. Democracies, acting on the will of the majority, signs stuff like that into law." She snapped her fingers. "And just like that one the 7 of March 2042… The world came crashing down. Because that scenario I just described, didn't just happen in Spain. It happened everywhere. It happened with the majority, it happened to the minorities. Countries that were smart enough NOT to even consider such inhuman laws were not spared the chaos either, because as these laws are enacted, it leads to the full-on collapse of the countries they happened in."
"Quirks users stopped giving a damn about the law, because why would they? The moment you strip people of human rights, you set a VERY dangerous precedent, and the fact is, that the common consensus amongst every quirk user at the time, was that the governments were planning on doing the same to ALL quirk users. All of this stupidity would have been bad enough… except oh yeah, the people who just got declared non-human? They got superpowers. There was only one way that was gonna end."
"Anyway, so began the collapse. Entire nations fell into complete anarchy, as quirk users began to be extremely violent against their homelands. And in response, the government cracks down harder, which leads the quirk users to become even more desperate, and in many cases leads them to ally with people who really don't like the government to begin with for completely unrelated reasons. Communists, separatists, fascists, quirk supremacists, whatever, people went to whoever would have them. And in many cases, that just meant their own communities. The end result? The situation just becomes more, and more complicated as people begin to take to violence more and more."
"But here's the kicker. Enough countries begin to collapse into widespread anarchy to the point that it starts affecting countries that AREN'T collapsing. The world is built on trade. Most countries aren't capable of feeding themselves anymore. They NEED food to come in on schedule in order for their entire nation not to starve. Then suddenly whatever country they are reliant on for food, goes belly up. Their food production goes to pieces, or they simply aren't able to export food anymore. Famine begins to take hold."
Finally, Black cat stopped sketching, then after flipping some pages back, she held up what she had been drawing.
Surprisingly, it was a comic, drawn in a very chibi style. What it was showcasing, was anything but cute.
"Then, to complicate matters, real, genuine civil wars began to break out, not all of which can be blamed on quirks. In Russia, the president is assassinated for reasons that don't have anything to do with quirks at all. The country goes into Civil War over who will succeed him, all the while quirk-related violence rages. Then, a random separatist quirk user uses his powers to destroy large amounts of farmlands over the course of a month. Russia suddenly isn't able to feed huge amounts of it's population. It tries to look outside it's country for food to import, but everyone of it's neighbors is in no better shape than it is. Millions starve to death. In the next 20 years, Russia's population will have gone down 61%."
She flipped the page, this time showing a whole bunch of nations with similar texts.
China 67% dead, India 54% dead, Japan 35% dead.
It wasn't like Izuku had… No idea about the catastrophic death toll of the collapse period, but to have it thrust into his face like this, with no sugar coating it was… Something else.
"The entire world economy collapses, countries that aren't able to be self-sufficient are absolutely fucked. Resources become slim and limited, lots of stuff that was commonplace stops being made. Education completely collapses, as people don't see any point to it, and focus instead on trying to survive. As a result, an entire generation grows up without ever going to school, if they survive at all. All the while, countries that are depopulated, are now being called into question of whether they should exist at all. Spain, China, Belgium, and many other countries that are composed of different ethnicities utterly collapse into different countries, never to reform again."
"But… China still exists."
"Yes, it does. But the China of that period was WAY larger than it is today. They ruled half of modern Mongolia, all the Tibetan plateau, and all of Manchuria. It also claimed to rule Taiwan, though that was more fiction than fact. Regardless… China would never reach the size it once had been."
...
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