Chapter Text
Quirkless Liberation Front
Notable Members: Eclipse, Overhaul (sometimes)
A villainous organization that dates back (with several changes and reorganizations in the meantime) to the times of the intense clashes between quirked and quirkless decades ago. Ever since then it transformed (in big part thanks to AFO taking it over secretly) from a quirkless supremacy group to a quirkless liberation group, fighting for rights of the quirkless.
It suffered badly about a decade ago due to the rise of Humarize which became a serious rival to the QLF. Eventually, thanks to All for One’s under-the-table support, Humarize was mostly driven out from Japan, with Eclipse reinforcing her authority over the quirkless there.
AFO did that in order to maintain its grip on QLF which supplied him with people ready to accept quirks in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. Humarize was much less likely to cooperate with him, due to being a worldwide organization making most of its assets exist where AFO’s reach was much weaker.
As a result of that, many of its higher officers had quirks. Some of them were legit late-bloomers, however a big part of them were actually granted their quirks by All for One and only pretended to be late-bloomers.
It is an extremely well-organized terrorist group, targeting hero agencies, police precincts, government offices and things connected to quirks (quirk training gyms, quirk counselors, hospital specializing in quirk healthcare etc.).
It is divided between combat cells and support cells, each of them operating mostly independently so that heroes can only hope to eliminate one or two every time. Combat cells are composed of trained combatants (5-30, mostly 5-10) armed with smuggled weapons. Some of them are dangerously close in training level to special forces operatives.
Support cells deal with logistics, earning money, recruitment etc. When needed, they can always call for the combat cells to get invested. In Cure to Evil, with access to foreign support, they’ve managed to create heavy weapons cells which operate vehicles, heavy weapons etc.
It earns money through extorting businesses located in the quirkless-heavy area, but they also have notable support from a number of wealthy quirkless or people with quirkless in their nearby family.
Creature Rejection Clan
Notable Members: Purity, Deathmonger, Purge, Incense, Pain, Infection, Silence, Long Step, Toxic Chainsaw.
Notable Locations & Properties: High Cathedral, Haiboro Woods, Onomura Pharma Corp.
A villainous organization based primarily on the violent rejection of those who appear too ‘different’ from the human average. It has been a massive threat early into the Dawn of Quirks. It started as a mostly quirkless organization, somewhat similar to QLF, but with more narrow targets.
It has begun to decline rapidly later on, as the vestigial mutations become more and more common, eventually falling apart so much that even All for One stopped supporting it. This lasted until Purity picked the remnants up and reforged them with a different goal in mind, in big part in the aftermath of the Kyoto Mutant Riots around twelve years before canon start year.
Purity focused the new CRC’s activity on fighting back against the complex mutants in particular, while ignoring or even recruiting simple mutants into their ranks (although the latter were pretty rare among the top ranks of the organization).
Her organization grew up enough to re-warrant AFO’s attention, who helped it subsume numerous lesser anti-mutant groups that grew in the aftermath of Kyoto events, seeing one giant organization as easier to control than a dozen smaller ones (and intending to play it against the ISP for additional chaos on the streets). As a result of this, while the ‘core’ of their organization has religious trappings, a lot of their parts are completely secular.
There were more benefits out of the deal. The biggest one was the High Cathedral, a small network of bunkers in the middle of nowhere belonging originally to the Council of Twelve. Everything valuable inside of it was taken by AFO 100+ years ago, but the main structure was still there, the entrance left buried under a thin layer of earth to keep anyone from stumbling onto it. CRC refurbished it into their headquarters and main training area.
It also owns (through a shell company) the Haiboro Woods mansion. At some point in the past it housed the leadership of the first CRC but has since fallen into disrepair. It has been used by Purity for her personal ‘parties’ occasionally, while also serving as a secondary headquarters in case of High Cathedral being discovered by the heroes.
CRC has obtained a surprising degree of support from a number of biomedical companies and organizations, with Onomura Pharma Corp. being the largest out of them. In large part it’s caused by the number of epidemics and pandemics during the last two centuries believed to be caused by animal complex mutants acting as pathogen mutation vectors. This makes people after medical education surprisingly vulnerable to CRC propaganda.
CRC is recruiting grunts primarily by performing ‘charity work’ in districts that suffered from mutant riots. Despite attempts of heroes and police to curtail this, it is also believed that many therapists dealing with aftermath of such events are involved with the CRC.
Inhuman Supremacy Party
Notable Members: Beast, Bearhead, Curator
ISP is an organization that is a bit hard to properly describe. It was born as a radical branch of the main complex mutants rights organization about 50-60 years ago. It has been dismantled eventually (the branch, not the party). However, while the organization itself was gone, the idea behind it wasn’t.
The result of that was the growing radicalism of several fringe groups that over time began to reform into the modern ISP under Beast’s leadership.
Interestingly enough, some part of the Table of Rejects (namely, organization of heroes with ‘unpopular’ quirks) is technically akin to a cousin to ISP, in that they are descendants from the same radical branch of the mutant rights group. It had supporters among the pro-heroes that kept their radical beliefs hidden.
They continued to support the ‘next generation’ of heroes with similar beliefs, continuing their existence. As a result, a big part of the radical branch of the Table (at least among the complex mutants) and even a few members of the moderate branch has historical ties with the ISP.
What has to be said about ISP itself is that it’s not exactly an organization in the traditional sense. The regular members of the ISP are the lowest in numbers when compared to other major villainous organizations.
It operates as a ‘riot organizer’ in the end. There are many complex mutant villainous organizations throughout the country, most of them small and unimportant. They all bow their heads to the ISP and will gladly answer its call to violence, especially when a few tougher members of the ISP join it.
With most of the communication between the members of the ISP and its subsidiary groups happening through untraceable connections through the VillainNET, it’s almost impossible to eliminate the entire organization. Heroes through the years have jailed or even killed dozens of its members, and dismantled hundreds of small gangs answering to the ISP, but to eliminate the organization itself is a much harder thing to do.
As a result, most of the ISP members support themselves with usual small-time crime, often getting a cut from the income of the mutant gangs they ‘vassalized’.
In most of the cases throughout my stories it happens because war or general chaos in the country starts, making ISP attempt to shift to a more regular organization structure to achieve more, which makes them vulnerable to attacks (and if you take out the major members, it’s likely that the group will collapse into numerous splinter groups.
Meta-Liberation Army
Notable Members: Re-Destro, Trumpet, Curious, Skeptic, Geten, Hypothermia, Ko Yotsubashi, Reload, Reassembler, Rave, Hellmouth, Fireline unnamed Quirk Contract holder, sometimes Juggernaut, Toxicity, Crucible, in ETS also Airhammer.
Notable Locations & Properties: Deika City, Gunga Mountain
An almost two-centuries old conspiracy dating back to the Meta-Liberation War that occurred during the Dawn of Quirks. When Destro was defeated (in big part due to ending up an enemy of AFO, early OFA Holders and Quirk Singer, even if at various periods of his career), the Army went into conspiracy.
For most of the past two centuries the MLA effectively didn’t exist. The bloodline of Destro continued, and there were certain supporters (political and not) of their general ideology. It operated as a political lobbying group, a circle of ‘friends’ in high places, and so on. However, as the time passed and the Quirk Laws began to feel more and more out of place (especially after the United States had largely lessened the post-Dawn of Quirks restrictions about 50 years ago), this began to change.
As a result, the MLA began a slow process of reintegration of numerous branch movements and lesser groups opting for quirk freedom, focusing on those with less villainous connotations. This was the beginning of the support structure of the MLA, and started during the later years of the questionable leadership of Re-Destro’s father (who at this point was a powerless symbol in the hands of his supposed advisors).
Re-Destro continued amassing power (while seizing control over the MLA from the old Board of Advisors before suppressing the Radicals during their failed coup) while using the support framework to begin establishing the paramilitary wing of the MLA. This was done mostly in the broad light - through a few controlled minor hero schools and a network of quirk training gyms throughout the country.
Especially the latter turned out helpful and easy to operate. Those gyms weren’t very popular, but were treated by the Government as a way of ‘letting steam out’ in a controllable environment (on private property and with owner’s permissions). MLA used H&M Party and Shoowaysha Publishing to make them more popular and began to send ‘correct’ instructors to change simple training into a more militarized form while finding potential recruits for the MLA.
It was also the time that the Deika City project started as an attempt to centralize the efforts, with Detnerat using its influence and money to - together with Feel Good Inc. - spearhead a development of a small mountain town (and ancient headquarters of the first MLA, with some liberationist and anti-governmental sentiments alive in the area after Government’s post-war suppressions) into MLA headquarters.
This allowed the organization to begin to produce regular forces (compared to irregular ones produced by the quirk gyms nationwide), while ‘hiding’ them behind the guise of security guards, bodyguards, police officers and even a reinforced company of JGSDF stationed in a small firebase in the city’s outskirts. Unawarely to the outsiders, those groups were part of a single organization and regularly led joint training in preparation for the Second Meta-Liberation War.
Today the MLA is effectively split between three main ideologies, kept together by Re-Destro’s authority as Destro’s heir and the Grand Commander of the MLA. Those three ideologies (all variants on destroism) exist as the three main groups within the MLA, the Moderates, the Centrists and the Radicals.
The Moderates want massive expansion of the quirk license system. Centrists want quirk licenses and quirk laws abolished completely. Radicals are quirk supremacists, who want to abolish quirk laws - and more.
The CTE version of that organization is much closer to canon (or, even worse, the bad part of fanon).
House of Glass
Notable Members: Glassmaker
A previously mid-sized organized crime syndicate which grew into becoming a major player of the underworld only after All Might’s large-scale criminal suppression operation executed in the aftermath of All for One’s death. However even if that wouldn’t have happened, it’s likely that Glassmaker would still become a large name in the Underground, if only thanks to her natural skills and strength.
House of Glass is the largest supplier of black market, dealing in human trafficking, drug trafficking, extortion, racketeering, gambling, prostitution etc. It inherited a lot of assets of the lesser criminal syndicates destroyed by All Might. It is also in a serious disagreement over territory with the remaining yakuza clans, due to House of Glass consciously ignoring (or downright making fun of) their tradition and attempting to subsume said clans.
HoG paid the ‘protection tax’ to AFO, however they never enjoyed that particular work relationship. As a result, HoG was kept in line mostly by the fear of AFO’s retaliation to any attempt to free themselves.
Clockwork Tower
Notable Members: Mechanist
One of the two largest criminal organizations in modern Japan. While House of Glass deals with ‘physical’ crime, Clockwork Tower is an entirely online criminal syndicate composed purely of hackers and programmers spread throughout the country, contacting each other almost purely through the VillainNET.
Clockwork Tower earns money through almost every single possible crime that can be executed through the internet. It is divided into five Levels depending on your personal skills according to the Mechanist himself. However, while there are no ‘forbidden’ crimes in the Tower, there are certain crimes that are unpopular enough among its members that they might impair your ability to reach higher levels of Tower (for example getting involved with child pornography) The higher you get, the more ‘serious’ the crimes, starting from operating entire networks of troll accounts and leading all the way to corporate espionage and even hacking governmental servers to obtain data to sell.
It is heavily suspected that on a few occasions Clockwork Tower hackers were employed by the Government against foreign targets, allowing the Government to claim that they weren’t involved in that particular data theft.
Equalizers
Notable Members: Liberator
A group that - together with QLF - was treated by the All for One as his personal recruitment ground where he could find someone ready to sell their souls to him for stronger quirk. A fact that didn’t stop it from being a technically terrorist organization.
Equalizers were born from more anarchist and socialist circles (especially among the poorer strata) that have seen the Hero System as a way of promoting social inequality, one celebrating a particular human quality that couldn’t be measured up by most of the people by default.
Nowadays Equalizers have mostly devolved into a group of anarchist terrorists lashing out against the heroes for a variety of reasons. They are on the downward spiral and are likely to collapse entirely if their present leader (and most known member) gets eliminated. While they operate on a cell-structure similar to QLF, they’re much less organized, much less financed and much less popular.
House of Red
Notable Members: Imaginer, Muscular, Moonfish, Magne
If Equalizers and QLF were All for One’s recruitment ground, House of Red was a common end-result of AFO’s operations. HoR was born as the VillainNET equivalent of a Discord Server for serial killers and more general murderers, and it didn’t take a lot of time for it to catch Demon Lord’s eye.
The result of that was AFO occasionally dropping powerful but hard to control quirks he got onto people with the right ‘mindset’ but lacking the means of becoming a true menace to society. As a result, HoR was filled with insane (or just murderous) people, most of which had powerful quirks and were ready to do a complete mess through bloodshed wherever and whenever All for One told them to.
As a result, it was - by nature - internally disorganized and prone to its members being arrested or killed in combat by the heroes. However, with All for One regularly replenishing them with new crazies, it continued to exist. It is unlikely however to manage to survive long without their patron.
Levellers
Notable Members: Mr. Compress, Ms. Compress, Gentle Criminal, La Brava, Twice, Non
First major group aside from MLA without direct ties to All for One, Levellers instead trace their past to the last of the Three Great Villains of the Dawn of Quirks, namely Oji Harima. They continue their ancestor’s job of stealing things from heroes that they find to not be sufficiently heroic (and sometimes villains).
Their history is full of ups and downs, regularly claimed to be eliminated with the recent arrests of their members, only to resurface again with new people a few years later. In the end, the idea behind being the ‘gentlemanly virtuous thief’ is hard to kill, and Levellers effectively monopolized it.
As a result, it’s quite common for people with such goals to reestablish the organization and use that name. There were times where none of Harima's direct descendants were a part of the Levellers, however it’s practically certain that if any of them decide to become villains and pick up the family's inheritance, they’ll inevitably end up either leading them or at least being major members of their group.
The current Levellers are generally considered to be one of the most famous and successful iterations of the group in history, at least ever since Oji Harima’s original group.