Taneo Tokuda

Mismatched pupils are the detail that stays with people: one white, one black, set in thin grayish-blue eyes behind thin-framed glasses with big circular lenses. Taneo is tall and lean, his black hair falling in waves down one side of an angular face with cheekbones high enough that Class 1-A's girls pronounce him handsome, and short sideburns run down both sides.

His working outfit pairs dark slacks with a beige blazer, worn above a black dress shirt he never bothers to tuck in, and a black camera rides on a strap at his neck whenever he is on a job.

Nothing appears to rattle him. Taneo ambles into the office wearing a smile and talks his frazzled editor-in-chief down, and he is not above trading on his face to get what he wants, finishing sentences with a wink and needling her until she produces his access to U.A. The charm covers a formidable eye. He pulled the buried meaning out of what All Might said at Kamino and worked his way from there to the identity of the successor, which is the kind of reading his profession rewards.

The manipulator is not the whole man. Taneo has loved All Might his entire life, ever since the hero pulled his father out of a burning industrial complex eighteen years earlier, and that devotion is the actual engine behind the hunt for Izuku Midoriya. It is also why he buried what he found, choosing to save it for a book about the new Symbol of Peace instead. He has a lighter side too, yanking Izuku into a surprise selfie and telling him he would keep the picture inside himself forever. The result is a reporter who is both sentimental and unusually principled.

Eighteen years ago, as a boy, Taneo watched fire tear through the industrial complex that employed his father. The scale of it made even the rescue crews hesitate. All Might went in anyway, staking his own life on it, and brought out all twenty-four people trapped inside, Taneo's father among them. In his relief the boy snapped a photograph almost by accident, and the newspaper he sent it to ran it alongside the story. That is where the reporter came from.

Years later he walks into Juzo News with a pitch for an editor-in-chief hungry for something that will bury the competition, and lays out his conclusion: All Might is grooming a successor inside U.A.'s own Class 1-A. She takes some persuading, but she secures him permission to visit the school. He arrives with a cover story about profiling dorm life in the wake of the Kamino Incident, and spends the day photographing students, running through 1-A's roster and their Quirks one by one, thinning the field until only Izuku is left.

He makes his approach with a photograph he has taken of the two of them together. Before Izuku can respond, Taneo explains himself: the admiration, the father All Might saved from the bombing, the simple wish to meet the protege face to face. What he takes from the meeting is the realization that the hope handed to him as a child now lives in Izuku and his classmates, and that hope is the thing he had been chasing all along. He takes one quick selfie, promises the secret is safe until he has finished the book he intends to write about him, When the New Symbol of Peace was Young, and goes.

The next day he returns to the office and performs failure, apologizing to his editor-in-chief for having chased a theory that went nowhere. In place of the promised exclusive he hands her a consolation piece on All Might and his meat buns, which she adores. His Quirk, Whole-Body Lens, is what makes the work possible: he can grow camera lenses at any point on his body, shoot with them, and print the photographs out of his chest. His editor calls him a scoop finder sent from heaven.