Hey everyone! As you can probably see, today, we're gonna be talking about our
favorite green Naruto. But if you're a fan of anime, stick around to the end of
this video for a super exciting announcement. Now that I've suitably
piqued your interest, let's get to today's episode. I'll talk to you later.
Well, I mean, I'm going to talk to you, like, right now because I'm the one hosting
this episode but, like, ah, you know what I mean.
Look, I try to be a pretty open-minded guy
but can we all agree that My Hero Academia has got some really weird
quirks on display? As Izuku said in the first episode of
the series, "all men are not created equal." Some folks gain the power to create
literally whatever they want, some are granted the immeasurable gift of
immediately copying other people's abilities, and some people can pull
eyeballs out of their skull but like they can't pull them out completely to
do recon, because they'd have to slice them off. *muttering*
Look, can we just agree that this guy has the worst quirk imaginable?
Can anyone find a worse one?
Anyway, look, while some quirks may be weird or gross or weirdly gross, nothing
is worse than having no quirk at all. But it's an unfortunate reality for about
20% of the people in the show's world as well as seven and a half billion of us
in the real world. Enter our old buddy Deku. So, as we all know by the end of
this story, Izuku Midoriya will become the world's greatest hero but he sure as
heck didn't get there himself. He was originally a regular old dumb quirkless
person like you and me. But here at channel Frederator, we can't help but ask
what if? And this time we're asking: what if Deku wasn't quirkless? I don't mean,
"what if Deku's quirk was hope all along?" or something dumb like that. What I'm
asking is: what if our Midoriya was part of the 80% of the population that did
develop a quirk. What would his quark be? I'm Jacob with Channel Frederator and
let's find out.
This might seem like a bit of an obvious question at a glance,
but there are a few different avenues we can go down, so let's start by looking at
how quirks develop in the first place. It pretty much goes without saying that
in the world of Hero Aca, quirks are in large part inherited from the parents.
Outside of really super rare cases and based on some rather obvious case
studies, you might assume that the way quirks are developed is like taking two
Oreos and then smashing them together to create a super depressed double stuffed
Oreo which..
yeah, kinda!
That's basically what happened with Todoroki, pretty much
evenly adopting his mother's ice quirk and his father's fire quirk. They even
make the point of mentioning in the show that quirk marriages are
sometimes arranged for the sole purpose of combining or enhancing quirks. But
there are a few hiccups that I want to hammer out just before we accept this as
the hard and fast rule for quark inheritance.
It looks like similarities and quirks are to be expected in siblings. After all,
we know that Tenya and his older brother share basically the exact same quirk but
if we shift our focus back to the Todoroki family, we often forget that
Shoto has three older siblings. But for some reason, Endeavor only ever referred
to Shoto as his masterpiece, training him from an absurdly young age to surpass
All Might as the number one hero. The obvious question I have is: if the
entire point of his marriage was to create powerful offspring, why would he
wait until his fourth kid to put this plan into motion? I mean, yeah, I'm pretty
sure Endeavor said at one point that Todoroki's siblings were a disgrace or
they lacked discipline or something but like, I mean, he should be able to whip
them into shape, right? What stopped him? Well, we don't really know what happened
with the eldest son since we never met him. Or have we? Oh what was that, was that
foreshadowing for a future Cartoon Theory? But with Shoto's other two
siblings, while we've gotten no confirmation as to what exactly their
quirks are, I do want to focus on one other thing: hair color.
This is Shoto's brother Natsuo. We haven't really met him in the show yet.
So far, this was kind of his only on-screen appearance, but you can see
that he's got white hair. And this is Shoto's sister who, like Shoto, has a
combination of both red and white hair but she's got significantly more white
hair. Now we covered way, way, in the past, back in our Loud House episode that
white hair is caused by the lack of production of melanin, which is what
contributes to hair pigments. But white hair isn't really a hereditary thing
outside of special cases like albinism. And, as if you needed me to tell you this,
but it is worth mentioning, this isn't how hereditary haircolor works. Not in
our world, anyway. If you're the kid of parents with blond hair and red hair, you
don't end up having blond hair with red streaks. Which would, admittedly, be
awesome but that's just, that's just not how it works. Which makes me think that
while yes, quirk inheritance is hereditary, I think that the rules of
genetics in this world are a little different than our current understanding.
You might remember this from your school days but the way that genes are
inherited can generally be illustrated on a diagram that looks like this, which
is known as a punnett square. As we know, people inherit genes from their parents
but what the parents contribute aren't the genes themselves but the
variance of the gene that they carry, known as alleles. For each gene, everyone
has within them two alleles that can be passed down to offspring, which can be
categorized as either dominant or recessive. And as their name suggests, the
dominant alleles are much more likely to manifest an offspring since they
basically take priority over recessive ones. The most common example of a
punnett square that you've probably seen would be one illustrating the likelihood
of a kid having brown or blue eyes. The uppercase B representing the dominant
brown allele and the lowercase b denoting the recessive blue allele. You
can also see how the likelihood might change depending on which pair of
alleles each parent carries. If someone carries both dominant and recessive
alleles for certain genes, they're said to be heterozygous while carrying only
the dominant or recessive variant means they're homozygous. We're gonna do a
buttload of logical leaps and stretches from here on out, and we're gonna kinda
play fast and loose with these rules but quirk science is an under explored field,
so let's at least just try to kind of understand it even if it means breaking
the rules a bit. Besides, we already found out on a previous Cartoon Theory that
everybody on this show's feet are weird misshapen nightmares that are missing
bones so.. who even knows what's real anymore? Anyway, since Gene inheritance
seems to be somewhat different in this show I'm willing to bet that hair color
and certain other traits are somewhat quirk dependent. That the dominant and
recessive elements of somebody's quirk can be identified through things like
hair color and vice versa. and the hair color itself could act as a
sort of visual representation of the disparity of the two quirks that were
inherited. This isn't a perfect idea, with this logic, Bakugo's hair should
probably be two different colors, too. But, first of all, Bakugo looks exactly like
a kid I knew in high school who bleached his hair for no other reason that he
thought it looked cool and, second of all, genes are unpredictable and I have no
other explanation for how two-tone red and white hair is a common occurrence in
this family. Oh, it's because living with Endeavor is super stressful. Okay, fine,
why does Todoroki have his hair right down the middle? That's awfully nice of
nature to take that symbolism into account. Besides, let's look at some other
examples here. Teddy and his brother: same hair, same quirk.
Jiro and her mom: same hair, same quirk.
Earlier, I asked why Endeavor didn't train any of his older
children like he tortured Shoto. And while it's a bit of a shaky assertion, I
also don't think it'll be widely contested if I say it's because that his
older siblings didn't have the right fire to ice ratio in their quirk. if we
use this hair color idea, we can see that his brother Natsuo and
his sister Fuyumi have mostly white hair. And because of this, I want to say
that white hair, as well as some sort of ice quirk in the Todoroki family is the
dominant gene. After all, white hair isn't considered a standard natural hair color
in newborns of our universe. But looking at the four Todoroki kids,
about sixty percent of their collective hair is white. The actual number is
probably closer to like sixty-five percent but forgive me for not doing
pixel measurements on Fuyumi's hair. It's possible that Shoto is considered by
Endeavor to be a masterpiece because his recessive fire quirk played more of a
role than his siblings, while still inheriting that dominant ice allele.
Granted, in real life, this line of logic isn't foolproof. If you find a family
where all of the kids have blue eyes, that doesn't make blue eyes a dominant trait.
But in this case, we're running with what little information we have and
we're basically trying to construct a Punnett Square for Deku. We know that
Deku would inherit both of his parents' quirks to a certain degree and,
thankfully, the show is mercifully straightforward with what his parents
quirks' are. His mom can attract small nearby items, basically a weak version of
the Accio spell from Harry Potter, and his father has the badass ability to breathe
fire! And based on these two quirks, one of the most popular theories is that Izuku,
like Todoroki would inherit a somewhat equal combination of these
quirks. Manifesting in some sort of fire quirk like pyrokinesis or firebending.
Or, if you're me, my first thought was throwing fireballs like Super Mario but,
maybe emanating from his mouth because, you know, fire breathing.
To fill in Deku's dad's info on this diagram, since we've shown that red hair/fire
quirks may be a recessive trait, we can make an educated guess that Deku's
dad would probably be homozygous. Possessing the same type of allele
instead of two alternates, which is common in folks who are born with red
hair since this variant most commonly appears in people with two recessive
alleles. As a side thing, if you aren't too tired from stretching, we could use
this to estimate that Deku's dad might have red hair. And no, that is not me
subtly saying that I think Endeavor is Deku's dad. Not-not yet, at least.
Now, what about Izuku's mom, Inko? This is actually where things are gonna get
super speculative. Like, even more than we've already been doing.
We had a reference point for Izuku's dad in the Todoroki family since they
both possess fire quirks, but since we don't have a point of reference for
anti-gravity quirks, Inko's alleles are gonna be a little
harder to justify, so bear with me here. And before you mention it, yes, Uraraka
does have an antigrav quirk but we don't really know what the other quirks in
her family are, making this kind of a moot point. So, here's what I'm thinking.
if we stick with the hair color approach, we've already established that
non-traditional hair colors can occur in this show. Y'know, cuz anime.
Now, regardless of hue, darker hair is generally a sign of a parent carrying a
dominant allele. So, we could assume that Inko does possess a dominant allele with
her dark green hair. As for the final piece of the puzzle, since we're working
with a hypothetical Izuku trying to figure out a quirk that doesn't exist,
it's basically impossible to figure out. So if we drive two different diagrams in
which Inko is either homozygous or heterozygous, we can calculate the
probability of Deku taking more after his mom or his dad. When we do, this we
see that if Inko is homozygous, possessing two of the same dominant
trait, it's 100% likely that Deku would take after his mom over his dad.
While if she's heterozygous, that likelihood drops to 50%. So if we assume the diagram on
the left is true, Deku might not inherit a fire quark at all and only have the
ability like his mom to float things. And if in quark inheritance, if both quirks
have to be present, we could assume a tiny contribution from his dad, if any at
all. Like a slight resistance to heat or maybe Deku would just really like spicy food.
However, if we assume the diagram on the right is true, then Deku
would be more likely to inherit a power closer to fire-breathing like his dad.
But if we combine both graphs, we see that regardless of what second allele
Inko has, Deku still has roughly a 75% chance of inheriting more traits from
his mother. With this about as taken care of as it can be, one last thing I want to
talk about is his name. Might sound weird but many of the
characters in this show have names that are directly related to their quirks.
Just as a couple examples from class 1A, Mina Ashido's surname is pronounced very
similarly to the japanese pronunciation of acid. Tsuyu's name contains the kanji
for frog. Tenya's name essentially means great runner. Kaminari's name
translates to electric thunder, t-the list just goes on. So, with that in mind,
could Izuku's name give us any insight into a possible quirk?
You know what, I'm not even gonna keep you in suspense, the short answer is no. His name, like his
classmates, was conceptualized with the characters' design in mind, incorporating
the kanji characters for things like green which, yeah, makes sense.
His name also refers to one coming out of their shell, as well as makes several
references to his possession of One for All. Turns out his quirk was the power of
being the protag. I'm just foolin', like I said, that kind of excuse that's not
enough for us. So let me suggest one more thing: his original name. The one he had
when he was but a glint in Kohei Horikshi's eye. The character that eventually
became Izuku Midoriya was always meant to be quirkless but his original
name before he got his haircut, which let us see his beautiful perpetually teary
eyes was Mikumo Akatani. And as somebody who doesn't speak a lick of
Japanese other than what you would expect from somebody who consumes a
disgusting amount of anime and memes, I did what I could in Google Translate and
Japanese character databases to glean any meaning out of this name. And the
kanji characters in this name that I found had meanings that very greatly
related to nature. Valley, cloud, ocean, red. And, look, you could come to probably any
conclusion with this name, it's not like it was originally intended to give us a
hint as to what Deku's natural quirk would be. this is all just a thought
experiment. But with everything we've looked at, the inclusion of red as
opposed to green, that's a pretty noticeable change.
I think the inclusion of red could be interpreted as fire. An ability to
control fire over land, sea, and sky, perhaps. Would he be able to create fire
in the same capacity as Endeavor? Probably not but based on both this and
what we learned when trying to unravel the genetic makeup of Deku's family,
while I was joking before, I think Super Mario fireballs is actually a pretty
good guess when it comes to Deku's natural quirk. A fire quirk but activated
through his hands, like his mother, as opposed to through his mouth like his
father. And, incidentally, I think they would be more like Luigi's fireballs in
Super Smash Bros. After all, just like his mother's quirk, these fireballs would be
unaffected by gravity. I guess not only is Deku Green Naruto,
but I guess he's also green Luigi. But Luigi is already green, so Deku is Luigi.
But, there you have it, a quirk that's representative of both his father's fire
powers and his mother's anti-gravity powers with a slight skew towards his
mother based on a mixture of genetics and quirk based pseudoscience. but that's
just my opinion on what Deku's quirk could be. What about you? Do you agree with our
thoughts or do you have any other ideas as to what Deku's natural quirk would be?
Let us know in the comments! Also, time for
that announcement I teased you about. If you've been following us on Instagram or any of
our social media, you probably saw an enigmatic image saying that the
Frederator family was expanding. A while back, a bunch of us at the office
realized that we're all huge anime fans and we want to share that love with you
so we started a new anime channel it's called get in the robot and we're gonna
have all sorts of awesome stuff there Whether you're already a fan of anime or
you're curious and you just want to dip your toes into the medium, we want to
welcome everybody let's discuss some awesome shows and movies together once
Once again, I'm Jacob with Channel Frederator, which loves you, and hopefully we'll see you on Get in the Robot soon.