Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Green Day)

"You guys are so astronomically ass." I said, slamming my forehead into my keyboard, the familiar sound of Galacta screeching 'Well, you can't expect to win 'em all...' fracturing my sanity.

"Well if SOMEONE was doing their job and healing, we wouldn't have this issue!"

I looked up at the scoreboard, the proof that I had the most healing, assists, and damage blocked in the match staring back at me.

"Riiight…." I said, tossing a near empty Mountain Dew can over my shoulder. It sounded like it hit the carpet, but I couldn't bring myself to care. "Definitely has nothing to do with you being all the way in their spawn going four and twelve. No sirree."

"Give the guy a break Dan, he's three kills up from last round. That's saying something." Sarah teased.

"I just wish he wouldn't play Spider-man." I grumbled, leaning back in my chair. "But I'll put up with it, it's just quick match."

I take a quick glance around my apartment, a small studio affair in an iffy part of town. The small kitchenette is overloaded with dirty dishes and take-out trash, and clearly hasn't been touched in over a week. The corner opposite the front door has a small futon on the ground, a mountain of dirty laundry piled up higher than the mattress next to it.

Next to the small bathroom, basically just a shower stall and a toilet, was a mountain of trash that was long past livable. Somewhere under that mass was a trash can I'd bought when I moved in but it has been since lost to time.

The only part of the apartment that wasn't an utter mess was the small six-foot cube that was my gaming set up, a shining RGB computer tower and triple monitor set up. Along the walls next to me was a collection of bookshelves, displaying figurines and Mangas of all genre. Above my desk was a glass display case with my favourites on it, a full hardcover set of Attack on Titan, all my Dungeons and Dragons manuals, and a handful of my more expensive figurines.

My prized possession though, was a poster of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Signed by Araki himself. It hung right over my bed, so I could stare at it while I slept, and hanging right beside it was my father's beloved guitar, signed by Eddie Van Halen.

I sighed. Soon, I'd have to do something about my apartment. At least enough so that when I called my mom for help cleaning, she'd be disappointed, not disgusted.

"Whatever. Let's just que up for the next match. I want to try out that new healer." I said, wiping Dorito dust from the hoodie I'd been wearing for this past week. A couple more days and I'd have to change.

The call was silent, not in an oppressive or tense way, just a simple, peaceful silence. It was nice.

Unfortunately though, Kevin could not read a room. "So… Dan. How's the new project going?"

My thoughts shifted to my newest game project, not just doing the art design and coding like in my other games but building it entirely from scratch solo.

"Honestly, it's rough. When I was building my Avatar game, I was piggybacking on Unity assets and was working with people who actually knew what they were doing, but Phantom Resonance is a solo project so I have to do everything from scratch."

"Ah man, that sounds tough. Why aren't you collaborating with them on this one then?"

 "Creative liberty." I replied, scrounging through the pillar of pizza boxes next to my desk. "When we were developing Reign of Azulon, my vision was perverted and twisted until my First-Person POV Role-Playing Game became a First Person Shooter. Can't have that happen with Phantom Resonance."

"Ooh, goodies." I mumbled, having found a cold, only slightly stale slice of pizza in the eighth box I'd checked.

"Soo… I have a question for you all." Mike said, popping up out of nowhere. "Who is your least-favorite anime main character?"

Johan, our other healer, was the first to speak up. "I really don't like Light Yagami. I get that the point of his character is to BE unlikeable, but the only reason he accomplishes anything past his chip-eating scene, is because of a hellish amount of protagonist luck. Not to mention, he's supposed to be 'smart' but it's clear his abilities are limited to the level of the writer."

"I'm pretty sure that's the point, though." Sarah says. "Light is an unreliable narrator. Everything he does from his perspective is the height of brilliance, and anything done against him is sheer, dumb luck, but we as the viewers can tell that isn't the case at all."

"I guess…" Johan grumbled. "I still think he's a lame MC. Then again, I'm not really for the whole 'psychological' genre in the first place."

"If you asked me," Tom started, "I'd say it's Naruto Uzumaki. Sure, he has that rough childhood, but we've seen time and time again that a lot of other people, whether that be Gaara, Karin, or even Killer B all had it worse. Not to mention he has plot armor times five. Uzumaki Bloodline, Kurama the Nine Tails, Fourth Hokage's son, Child of Prophecy, Asura's reincarnation… How am I supposed to like the guy? Every metric that you could like him for is passed by another of the Konoha Twelve."

Kevin, the Naruto simp, shouted in faux outrage. "You like him because of his loyalty! He went around the entire ninja world, repeatedly, just to save his friends. Sakura? He threw his life on the line during the Land of Waves Arc. Hinata? He flew into a four-tailed rage for her during the Pain arc. Gaara? He risked delivering himself to the Akatsuki to save him. Sasuke? The Sasuke retrieval arc vs the Sound Four, the Three-Year Journey, and the whole Summit Arc. It's his love and understanding of everyone he comes across that makes you like him."

Tom debated back like he had prepared beforehand. "That's part of the problem though. Naruto is a walking bundle of attachment issues. It just isn't healthy. Sasuke tried to kill him, from my count, at least six time. Sakura makes it clear from jump that she'd be okay with him fucking off forever and he spends five-hundred episodes simping for her. And then two hundred episodes past that simping for his true soulmate, Sasuke."

At that, even Kevin took a step back. "We don't talk about Sasuke." Kevin grumbled. "We've already given the Sasuto shippers enough ammo."

Sarah took the break to speak up. "I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think Izuku Midoriya is the worst MC. He spends fourteen years of his life desperately wanting to be a hero, but he doesn't actually DO anything towards that goal. By the time Deus Ex All Might swoops in he's a scrawny nerd who has never thrown a punch in his life. If he'd truly intended to be a hero, he would have at least pumped some iron. Not to mention, he spent up to twelve years chasing Katsuki, his bully. Hell, by the end of the show he's STILL convinced his precious 'Kacchan' Is his bestie."

For some reason, I found myself getting offended. "Well I wouldn't say that's exactly fair, Sarah." I scoffed. "Izuku started with nothing. His mom apologized for his birth, his father abandoned him, and his best friend started calling him a 'shitty useless pebble'. Not to mention the actual abuse that we see in the show, like episode one, where his teacher hits him, and his classmates use him for target practice. Is it too far a stretch to say that he had it rough?"

"I get where you're coming from, Dan." Sarah eventually said, tone hesitant. "But Deku's issues are bad. Yeah, he has it rough to get started, but my point is he never put in any effort. He could have gone on runs, done bodyweight workouts like pushups, anything to avoid being nothing. But he just didn't try."

"But he did try." I responded, voice a little more heated. "He wrote. He analyzed. He thought. And on that day where he was about to die, that day when All Might saved him, he put everything on the line to get even the barest amount of encouragement from his personal hero, who just took another step to destroying his psyche."

I took a steady breath and grabbed a long stale can of soda from beside my monitor, taking a deep draft of the borderline expired cola.

"And then, after he'd been told by 'Mr. Anyone Can Be a Hero' that he was an exception to the rule, standing on a roof much the same as the one that his former best friend told him to leap from, he still manages to drag himself to save that same former best friend's life." I tossed the can onto the trash heap behind me.

"And then his problems get worse. His personal hero, the man he has looked up to for his entire life, looks him in the eyes and says that risking his life was the right thing to do, and that he has earned legendary power by doing so. That the only way he would matter is if his life was on the line."

No one said anything.

"As a result, we get a crybaby loser with the power of a god and a martyr complex." Sarah said, with finality. "Well, if you were Horikoshi, what would you have done?"

I take the time to genuinely consider Sarah's question. What would I have done to make sure that Deku was a hero I could genuinely admire?

"I would have given him a role model. A genuine one. Not one that was a god in human skin like All Might, or an egotistical sociopath like Bakugou, but a solid and caring presence in his life. Someone to curb and share the pain that Izuku experiences and to teach him to be better for it. That's what he's missing. Naruto had Jiraiya, Kakashi and Iruka, Luffy has Shanks, and even Issei had Ddraig, to an extent. Izuku had no one to rely on."

"Like a Miyagi to his Daniel-san." Kevin said, wisely.

"Roughly, yeah," I snorted. "Even someone with some flaws, as long as they're there for him. The kind of person who would show up for him and be there even through their own issues, someone who'd still stick around because they care about who he is. All Might may have taught Izuku about being a hero, but he didn't teach him shit about how to be a person."

After like five seconds, Mike spoke up. "Hey uhh, I don't mean to interrupt all of this, but Dan, you forgot to requeue."

"Ah shit!" I shouted, quickly throwing the pizza box I had in my hand behind me. "My bad, my bad. Just got heated for a second. Requeuing now."

Unfortunately, the very second my hand touched my mouse, a baseball burst through my window like the Kool-Aid man, rebounding off the front door and slamming into the shelf above my desk.

The glass shelf.

The glass shelf that was now cracking.

Now, I probably should have done something. I could have thrown my arms up to shield myself from my impending doom. I could have thrown myself backwards out of the range of the avalanche of glass, hell, I could have even screamed like a little girl in the hopes that it would do anything. Instead I just whispered. "Oh shit."

And then it shattered.

Glass shards rained down on me like crystal hail, piercing into any bit of exposed flesh they could find. Next came the hardcover copies of my books, dropping on me like tactical strikes from Amazon Prime. A particularly hefty copy of The Dungeon Master's Guide led the charge, hitting me square in the forehead and ensuring I failed my intelligence saving throw.

I barely had time to groan before the coup de grace. My cursed lava lamp—the one I got off eBay for the extremely low price of "This Shit Is Definitely Cursed," launched itself at me like a pro wrestler, followed closely by a cadre of anime figurines.

The accursed lava lamp shattered on my face, launching what can only be described as Satan's molten lime Jello across every visible surface of my apartment. A small figurine of Tony Tony Chopper was next, plummeting towards me with a velocity NASA would have admired. I finally fell backwards out of my chair, falling into the trash pile behind my desk.

My head hit the carpet, now a battlefield littered with pepperonis, shards of glass, and the broken pieces of my dignity. The irony wasn't lost on me. I always thought I'd go out in some grand, stupid way—maybe bungee jumping off a bridge or choking on a gas station burrito. But no. My life ended because some dickhead thought my parking lot was a batting cage.

As my vision blurred and darkness crept in, I could feel the pizza grease seeping into my hoodie. I could smell the pungent mix of burnt hair, days-old pizza, and shattered dreams.

My last coherent thought was, "I'm not getting my safety deposit back.'