the BNHA universe is a dystopia and here’s why

• heroism, as a career, only has one point: to stop people, especially oppressed people, with godlike abilities from starting a revolution against the state.
• exhibit a: the hero agency and the licenses. you can only harness your abilities if you’re working for the state.
• exhibit b: propoganda. the government publishes popularity polls and bases the hero’s income on popularity rather than results. because their job isn’t to curb crime, their job is to influence people into accepting the state’s authority and make heroism appealing to youngsters with strong quirks.
• exhibit c(a): UA. or rather, the entire system of education. the entire point of it seems to be to get them young and get them permanently. these are glorified child soldiers, who only recieving training for a particular field. there’s a reason why you pick the hero stream at 15 and not 25, even though teenagers are fickle and immature, and older heroes make more sense, and why UA is a highschool and not a university. speaking of university,
• exhibit c(b): discouraging higher education. so far, none of our protagonists have discussed college at all. in fact, the only person who seems to have attended university is all might, and he went to another country. why was that? a lot of asians prefer going to American colleges but I think the reason is far more sinister: the universities are extremely underfunded, because few attend, because it’s discouraged by the state.
• exhibit c©: axing the humanities. as done by real world autocratic regimes, there seems to be little humanities education, even at school level. to the extent that our protagonist, our canonically nerdy and studious protagonist, is unaware of major political changes that happened only a few decades ago. even the ones relevant to all-might, his object of obsession, whom he seems to know everything about.
• exhibit d: villains. now, this is pure conjecture. but what in the world do you gain from being a villain in the bnha universe? petty and organised crime make sense, but dressing up and targeting heroes, specifically, doesn’t. here’s what does: the government targeting vulnerable children and radicalising them into villainy, to prevent its plus-ultra heroes from being idle. and it’s a self sustaining cycle: more villains mean more heroes mean more fights mean more collateral damage and targets for the government to push to villainy.