Hey everyone. Before we go any further, I need to say something. I need to say it clearly, I need to say it simply, and I need to say it once, because I am not going to repeat myself and I am not going to argue about it in the comments.
This is a Superman fic.
I need you to understand what that means, because based on every other Superman crossover fanfiction I have ever read—and I have read a lot of them, folks, I have read so many of them that I have genuinely lost sleep over how badly some of them miss the point—I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding in this community about what a Superman story actually is.
So let me be clear.
There will be no harem.
None. Zero. Not a single one. I don't care how attractive the characters in MHA are. I don't care how many people ship Superman with Momo or Midnight or Mirko or whoever the flavor of the month is. This is not that story. Superman is not going to have a rotating cast of love interests fawning over him. He is not going to blush when a girl talks to him. He is not going to accidentally walk in on someone changing and stammer and get a nosebleed like this is a bad ecchi anime. That is not who Superman is. That has never been who Superman is. Superman is a man who loves deeply, sincerely, and completely, and when he loves someone—if he loves someone in this story—it will be one person, and it will be real, and it will be treated with the respect and gravity that love deserves. Not as a gag. Not as a power fantasy. Not as a collection mechanic.
If you came here looking for a harem fic, the back button is right there. I won't be offended. Go find what you're looking for. It's not here.
Superman will not act out of character.
This is the thing that keeps me up at night. This is the thing that makes me want to throw my laptop into the sun. I have read Superman crossover fics where Superman—Superman—loses his temper and beats a teenager half to death because the teenager said something rude. I have read Superman crossover fics where Superman threatens to kill people. I have read Superman crossover fics where Superman is afraid of characters who, in any rational analysis of their respective power sets, could not hurt him if they tried for a thousand years. I have read Superman crossover fics where Superman acts like Batman, or Wolverine, or the Punisher, or literally any character other than Superman, because the author apparently thinks that being good and kind and gentle is boring and that the only way to make Superman interesting is to make him not Superman.
This is not one of those fics.
Superman in this story is Superman. He is kind. He is patient. He is gentle. He is compassionate. He is humble. He is selfless. He helps people not because he wants recognition or reward but because helping people is the right thing to do. He does not lose his temper. He does not threaten. He does not intimidate. He does not bully. He does not use his power to make people afraid, because the entire point of Superman is that he is the most powerful being on the planet and he uses that power to make people feel safe.
Will he be firm? Yes. Will he stand his ground? Yes. Will he refuse to back down when someone is being hurt? Absolutely. But there is a difference—a vast, Grand Canyon–sized difference—between being firm and being cruel, between being strong and being violent, between standing your ground and grinding someone else into the dirt. Superman knows that difference. He has always known that difference. It is, in many ways, the defining characteristic of who he is.
If you want a Superman who punches first and asks questions never, who broods on rooftops and glares at people and treats every interaction like a dominance contest, go read Injustice. Actually, don't read Injustice, because Injustice gets Superman wrong too. Injustice takes the laziest possible interpretation of Superman—"what if the good guy became bad?"—and treats it as profound when it's actually just depressing and fundamentally dishonest about who the character is. Superman would not become a dictator if Lois Lane died. He wouldn't. I know this. Every person who has actually read Superman comics knows this. Superman has lost Lois in the comics. Multiple times. In multiple continuities. And you know what he does? He grieves. He mourns. He struggles. He hurts. And then he gets back up and he keeps helping people, because that is who he is at his core, and his core does not change based on circumstances. That's the whole point. That's what makes him Superman and not just some guy with powers.
If Lois dying could turn Superman into a tyrant, then he was never really Superman to begin with. And the writers who think that's an interesting story are telling on themselves more than they're telling a story about Clark Kent.
Same goes for Zack Snyder's version. I'm going to be respectful here because I know some people like those movies and that's their right, but I need to be honest: that is not my Superman. A Superman who snaps necks, who causes billions of dollars in collateral damage without seeming to notice or care, who is framed as a brooding, reluctant, almost resentful god who saves people because he has to rather than because he wants to—that is not the character Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created. That is not the character who has endured for nearly a century because he represents the best of what humanity could be. That is a different character wearing Superman's costume, and while I understand the artistic choices that led to that interpretation, I do not agree with them and I will not be replicating them here.
You want to know what my Superman looks like? Read All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Read Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross. Read Superman: Birthright by Mark Waid. Read Superman: Secret Identity by Kurt Busiek. Read Superman For All Seasons by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. Read Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? by Alan Moore. Read Superman Blue. Read Action Comics #775, "What's So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way?", the single greatest Superman story ever written, the story where Superman faces a team of antiheroes who think that killing villains is the only way to protect people and Superman proves them wrong not by outfighting them but by showing them what they've become.
Read those stories. That is who Superman is in this fic. That is who Superman will always be in this fic. A good man. A kind man. A man who catches cats from trees and writes letters to sad children and holds people who are hurting and never, ever, ever stops believing that people are worth saving.
Now. About the fights.
Yes, there will be fights. There will be confrontations. Superman will encounter villains. He will encounter the League of Villains. He will encounter All For One. He will encounter Shigaraki. He will encounter every threat that the MHA universe has to offer.
And he will win.
Every single time.
I need to be very clear about this because I have read—and I cannot stress enough how much this bothers me—I have read Superman crossover fics where Superman loses fights to street-level thugs. I have read fics where Superman is challenged by characters whose power sets would not even register on Superman's radar, and somehow, through some contrived and inexplicable narrative gymnastics, Superman struggles. Superman takes damage. Superman is "pushed to his limits." Superman is "forced to go all out."
No.
Absolutely not.
Do you understand what Superman is? Do you understand what his power set actually entails? Superman has moved planets. Superman has flown faster than the speed of light. Superman has survived the heat of a star. Superman has punched through dimensions. Superman has lifted infinity. Literally infinity. That is not an exaggeration. In the comics, Superman has demonstrated feats of strength, speed, and durability that place him so far beyond anything in the MHA universe that the comparison is not just unfair, it is meaningless.
All For One cannot beat Superman. All For One is a very powerful character within the context of My Hero Academia. Within the context of a fight with Superman, All For One is a man standing in front of a hurricane and trying to blow it back with his breath. It doesn't matter how many quirks he has stolen. It doesn't matter what combination of abilities he brings to bear. Superman is faster. Superman is stronger. Superman is more durable. Superman's heat vision operates at temperatures that would reduce All For One to his component atoms before the man could blink. Superman could end any fight in the MHA universe in less than a second. He could do it without breaking a sweat. He could do it without even trying particularly hard.
And that's fine.
I know what you're thinking. "But if Superman can't lose, where's the tension? Where's the drama? Where's the conflict?"
And the answer is: the conflict is not physical. The conflict was never physical. The conflict in a Superman story is never about whether Superman can punch hard enough. The conflict in a Superman story is moral, emotional, philosophical. It's about what it means to be good in a world that rewards selfishness. It's about how you help people who don't want to be helped. It's about the loneliness of being the only person who can hear every cry for help on the planet and knowing that you can't be everywhere at once, even though you're faster than anything alive. It's about the tension between doing what's right and doing what's legal when those two things are not the same. It's about how you remain gentle when you could so easily be brutal, how you remain humble when the world treats you like a god, how you keep believing in people when people keep letting you down.
That is where the story is. That is where the drama lives. Not in fight scenes. The fight scenes in this fic will be short because they should be short. Because the point of a fight scene in a Superman story is not the fight. The point is what happens around the fight—who Superman protects, what he says, what he chooses not to do with his power. The point is that Superman could vaporize the villain and instead he catches the falling building. The point is that Superman could end the threat in a nanosecond but instead he spends that nanosecond making sure a child isn't watching because he doesn't want a child to see violence.
The point is that Superman is not a weapon. He is a shield.
If you want a fic where the main character has dramatic, drawn-out fights where the outcome is uncertain and the power levels are evenly matched and there's a lot of screaming and powering up and dramatic speeches mid-battle, there are ten thousand fics for that. This isn't one of them. Superman doesn't need to power up. Superman doesn't need to "get serious." Superman is always serious about protecting people. He just doesn't need to try very hard to do it because he is, objectively and inarguably, the most powerful being in this fictional universe by a margin so large it might as well be infinite.
And that's not a bug. That's a feature. That's the whole point of the character. Superman isn't interesting despite being overpowered. Superman is interesting because he is overpowered. Because the question has never been "can Superman beat this villain?" The question is "how does Superman choose to deal with this villain while remaining true to who he is?"
That's the story I'm telling.
One more thing.
Superman is not going to become a professional hero. He is not going to attend U.A. He is not going to register with the Hero Commission. He is not going to get a license. He is not going to join an agency. He is not going to participate in the hero ranking system.
Because the hero system in MHA is broken.
I love My Hero Academia. I think it's a great series with compelling characters and interesting themes. But let's be honest about what the hero system in that world actually is: it is a government-sanctioned monopoly on violence and rescue that has turned the fundamental human impulse to help others into a regulated, commercialized, ranked, sponsored, branded industry. It is a system where you need a license to save someone's life. Where a bystander who uses their quirk to rescue a person from a burning building can be arrested for doing so without authorization. Where heroes compete for rankings based on popularity and case numbers as if heroism is a sport and human suffering is a scoreboard.
No one in that system—no one—is a true hero by Superman's standard. Not All Might, who is the closest and who I have enormous respect for as a character, but who nevertheless operates within a system that prioritizes spectacle over substance, who built his entire career around being a symbol rather than a person, and who allowed the system to continue unchallenged because the system worked for him. Not Aizawa, who is pragmatic to the point of cruelty, who expelled an entire class of students on his first day because they didn't meet his standards, who operates on a philosophy of "rational deception" that Superman would find fundamentally dishonest. Not Izuku Midoriya, who is the heart of MHA and who has the right instincts but who nevertheless buys into the system completely, who dreams of being a licensed hero, who never once questions whether the system itself might be the problem.
They're not bad people. Most of them are good people. But they are good people operating within a bad system, and they have accepted the system's premises without challenge. They have accepted that heroism requires a license. They have accepted that some people are allowed to help and some people are not. They have accepted that the right to save lives is something the government grants rather than something that exists inherently in every human being.
Superman does not accept those premises. Superman has never accepted those premises. Superman helps people because people need help, and the idea that a government bureaucracy could grant or revoke the right to do good is, to Superman, not just wrong but incomprehensible. It is like being told you need a license to breathe. It is like being told you need permission to be kind.
So no. Superman will not be joining the hero system. He will be operating outside it. He will be, by the legal definition of this world, a vigilante. And the hero system will not like that. The Hero Commission will not like that. The professional heroes will not like that. And Superman will not care, because Superman does not measure his actions against the law. He measures them against his conscience. And his conscience is clear.
Alright. That's enough from me. I've said what I needed to say. If you're still here, if you've read all of this and you're still on board, then welcome. I'm glad you're here. This story is for you. This story is for everyone who ever read a Superman comic and felt something stir in their chest. Something warm and bright and stubborn and good. Something that whispered, in a voice that sounded a lot like a man in a red cape, that the world doesn't have to be dark. That people don't have to be cruel. That strength and kindness are not opposites but partners. That the most powerful thing you can do is not to destroy but to protect.
This is a story about Superman being Superman.
That's it. That's the whole pitch.
If that's not enough for you, I understand. No hard feelings.
But if it is—if the idea of a genuinely good person in a world that has forgotten what genuine goodness looks like is something that interests you—then stick around.
It's going to be a hell of a ride.
Not because of the fights.
Because of everything else.
— The Author
P.S. — If you leave a comment saying "but what about Deku's plot armor" or "Superman should join Class 1-A" or "you should nerf him so the fights are fair," I am going to respond with a full-page scan of Action Comics #775 and nothing else. You have been warned.
P.P.S. — Go read All-Star Superman. Seriously. Right now. It will make you a better person. That's not hyperbole. Grant Morrison wrote a story so full of hope and compassion and genuine human decency that reading it is a moral experience. If you finish it and you don't feel something, check your pulse, because you might be dead.
P.P.P.S. — James Gunn gets it. That is all.