MatPat: Oh man, I can't wait for the new episode of My Hero! "The U.A. Sports festival"—
"I'm sorry, Izuku"!—"Deku,
you b*stard"!—"Young man,
You too can become a hero."—
*Midoryia's crying*—*My Hero Academia Outro*
Spongebob Narrator: One week later. MP: Oh, man. I can't wait for this new episode of My Hero Academia!—"Internships"—
"I'm sorry, Izuku!"—"You b*stard!"—
"You too can become a hero."—*Midoriya's crying*—
*My Hero Academia Outro*
S.B. N: One- MP: YES! I can't wait for this new episode of My Hero Academia! "Stain"—
"Izuku"—"Bastard!"—"Become a hero"—
*Midoriya crying*—*MHA Outro*
Is it just me or am I starting to notice a pattern here?
*The Best Intro Ever*
MP: Hello Internet, welcome to Film Theory! The show that always sweats the small stuff. Speaking of sweat,
You know what I hate? Katsuki Bakugou. With the sandy-haired, hyper-aggressive bully from My Hero Academia. I know, I know, I get it!
He's learning to accept others and blah blah blah blah blah, but seriously dude, get over yourself!
Katsuki: "I don't need any of your protection, dammit!"
It's one thing to be stubborn and cocky but jeez, dial it back once in a while.
Katsuki: "I just wanna say:
I'm gonna win."
Other Charaters: "Get off the stage!"
But even I have to admit that, despite his obnoxious personality, he has got himself one heck of a fascinating superpower
While quirks in the Hero Academia universe can range from
Godlike to totally useless, when Bakugo spun the wheel,
He definitely landed closer to the godly end of the scale. If you don't know the show,
Let me tell ya, he's got himself the power to produce massive
Explosions, but the way that he activates that power, like Bakugou himself, is um less than pleasant.
You see, Bakugo's quirk isn't just making things magically explode. He's no Yoshikage Kira.
*To Be Continued Meme Soundtrack*
Instead, Bakugou's explosions are a byproduct of his actual quirk,
Which is that he sweats nitroglycerin, or to be more specific a substance, very similar to nitroglycerin, which he can detonate at will
Katsuki: "Since you're such a stalker, by now you know how my quirk, Explosion, works.
I secrete nitroglycerin-like sweat from my hands and make it blow up."
MP: Essentially, the sweatier he gets, the bigger his explosions are. And over the course of the series,
We've seen Bakugo make some pretty darn big
Earth-shattering kabooms. Even without his special grenade gloves that store up his uh fluids to create bigger blasts.
So of course, all this raises the obvious question:
How much would Bakugou have to sweat to create blasts as big and powerful as he does?
Welp, you outta know by now that that's the exact sort of insane
Question that I answer on this channel. So roll on some Old Spice and make sure that you're wearing an undershirt,
*Some movie quote I can't quite hear that's about sweat* since today, we're literally working up a sweat to prove how hot under the collar this anime
Character gets. And spoiler alert! He's producing more sweat daily than the gaming room at your local anime convention
Oh, yeah, it's that bad. To begin,
We're told that Bakugou's sweat is basically identical to nitroglycerin. And since science knows a lot about how much nitroglycerine
Expands when it explodes, I'm measuring a given explosion from the anime. We can work out pretty easily
Exactly how sweaty Bakugou would have to get to produce it.
Now, one thing I'm not gonna do is look at what Bakugou can do in his hero costume
since those grenade gauntlets of his are designed to store his sweat over time, thus making their
explosive power more based on how long he's been wearing them as opposed to how much he's actually sweating.
That said, the newest season of the anime has given us a great benchmark.
In season 3 episode 3, we're given a quirk training montage where each character is trying to push their quirks to the limit in order to
Expand their powers. We're expressly told that Bakugo is
So, not only are these visually the largest fireballs that he produces in the series,
We also know that Bakugo is intentionally pushing himself to his limits here to unleash his full strength;
both in terms of explosion size as well as how fast he's making those explosions happen.
At first, I thought I could just measure the blasts using Bakugou himself
as the measuring stick, since he's right there and we know that his canon height is exactly a hundred and seventy two centimeters,
Based on the character stat cards that pop up between commercial breaks.
However, I wanted to be as precise as possible which, when it comes to Bakugou, is a bit of an issue.
He has that super saiyan perm thing going on that makes it hard to figure out how exactly
his height's being measured. And he almost never stands up straight
Lucky for us though, Bakugou is not the only measuring stick that we have at our disposal here.
He's standing next to an oil drum—the exact same kind of oil drum that his fellow
Classmate, Todoroki, is using for his training. And with his good posture and flat haircut,
This icy hot honor student makes for a much better measuring stick.
We know that from heel to head, Todoroki stands at
176 centimeters tall. That means, using his height in this manga profile picture as a baseline,
We can determine his pupillary distance or the distance between the centers of the pupils of his eyes.
A measurement that's often taken by optometrists during eye appointments.
On average, male pupillary distances are between five point three centimeters and seven point seven centimeters
And Todoroki's pupils are exactly
7.62 centimeters apart
So it falls right in that range. This measurement can then be translated over to the training montage
To measure the barrel from side to side in this shot. Which gives us a barrel diameter of seventy nine point eight eight centimeters.
Finally, we can apply those barrel measurements to the one standing next to Bakugou to measure the diameter of the fireball.
Aaaaaannnnddd
Here's where we run into one other snag.
You see, we're never actually shown the full scale of the fireball that Bakugou creates.
Despite it being a distant shot that we can clearly tell goes above the treeline.
So we're just gonna have to settle for measuring the part of the fireball that we can actually see in this flat on shot but
Trust me even that it is more than enough
If we cut a chunk off the fireball starting at the widest point before it goes past the edge of the screen,
we get a dome that's 2,545 centimeters across by 716 centimeters tall.
Plugging those numbers into this formula, which measures the volumes of spherical caps, gives us a total volume of two
thousand four hundred twenty-eight point two cubic meters or two million four hundred and twenty eight thousand two hundred and seven liters of
Exploding gas. That certainly sounds like a lot, but to truly understand what that means,
Let's dig a little deeper. Doing a little research,
We know that when it explodes, nitroglycerin expands to a little over twelve hundred times the volume of its original liquid form.
So all we have to do is divide the volume of the
Explosion by twelve hundred to see just how much sweat Bakugou would need to produce it. Leaving us with a final grand total of
A whopping two thousand twenty three and a half liters of sweat.To put that in perspective, an average human
Produces between point eight and one point four liters of sweat during an hour of exercise.
Or, for a fair point of comparison since Bakugou's using hot water to open up his sweat glands, an average person produces
Just one liter of sweat after fifteen minutes in a steam room. Bakugou is sweating at least
2,000 times that amount in the five seconds between
Explosions in this scene—and remember, that's just part of the fireball. The whole thing is three to four times the size of what we
Can actually measure which means that Bakugou is probably producing closer to six
Thousand liters of sweat in five seconds, from just the palms of his hands.
That's about a hundred and fifty times the total volume of liquid contained in the average human body.
And if a real person were truly sweating that much liquid, they'd shrivel up and die like a prune in a fraction of a second.
But let's just ignore that problem for a moment and assume that Bakugou's quirk somehow
Compensates for this rapid fluid loss by other means; the same way it prevents his explosions from blowing his hands off.
I mean after all, this is a universe where a guy's whole body can be made out of
Teleporting mist or a guy's face can be made out of flame or a guy could have teeth that turn into magically long blades
So who's to say what is and isn't possible with these darn quirks?
Assuming that he wouldn't die from it, in terms of liters per second, Bakugo is sweating over a million times faster
Than the average human being. Let that sink in for a minute
He is sweating a million times faster than you. If you were to stand with that barrel in an Olympic swimming pool,
He would be able to fill the entire thing with his sweat in 34 minutes and 43 seconds.
Every 30 minutes, he's sweating the amount of an Olympic swimming pool. Egh, gross!
Movie Character: "Hey! Sweating is the act of a healthy body."
MP: Of course, Bakugou isn't gonna spend all day in sauna conditions. But even at regular temperatures,
he'd be sweating buckets on a daily basis; literally sweating buckets! On an average day, a regular person'll produced between
500 and 700 milliliters of sweat. At a million times that rate, Bakugou would be sweating between five and seven hundred
thousand liters every single day.
Which, let's be honest, would probably mean he'd need to drink a little bit more than eight glasses of water per day to stay hydrated.
And it would definitely mean that I wouldn't want to sit anywhere near him in class or on a bus.
Clearly, Bakugo is going in the completely wrong direction when he chose his hero name. Katsuki: "King Explosion Murder."
Midnight: "I'm gonna say that one's a little too violent."
MP: *evil MatPat laugh* Forget all that. With palms sweaty as yours, buddy, you're better off calling yourself the Swamp Thing.
But hey! That's just a theory! A film theory! Aaaannndd cut!