In the world of My Hero Academia, nearly 80 percent of the population have inborn superpowers
called quirks.
These superpowers run the gamut from the standard to the completely bizarre, but not all quirks
are created equal.
Here are the worst and best quirks ranked.
Minoru Mineta has the ability to throw giant sticky balls that grow on his head in place
of hair.
The balls stick to whatever surface they land on, but Mineta himself bounces right off.
Already, we're off to a bad start.
The idea of throwing sticky balls that grow out of your scalp is incredibly disturbing.
The worst part, however, is the side effect that comes from throwing too many of his hair
balls.
If Mineta overuses his quirk, his head starts to bleed, which implies that his balls are
closer in composition to skin than hair.
All in all, it's a deeply disturbing quirk that's gross enough to offset even the faintest
possibility of usefulness.
It might seem strange for a quirk with so few downsides to land on the tail-end of this
list, but by the same token, Mashirao Ojiro's quirk has no upsides, either.
It's just a tail.
In fairness, it's a tail that he has enough control over to whip around and smack villains
with.
However, compared to the most powerful and most bizarre quirks in My Hero Academia, his
superpower is just boring.
In fact, the plainness of his Quirk is about as much character as Ojiro gets.
When your entire personality is rooted in how boring your superpower is, that's when
you know you've lost the genetic lottery.
Still, there's no need to live life with your tail between your legs.
Mirio Togata is one of the most impressive heroes in My Hero Academia.
Trained by the pro hero Nighteye and considered one of the Big Three at U-A, Mirio seems to
be the platonic ideal of an All Might successor.
Most impressively, he does it all with a Quirk that's much worse than he makes it look.
With his Permeation Quirk, Mirio can become completely intangible; when he becomes tangible
inside of a solid object, he's rocketed out of that object at high speed.
You might be wondering why such a useful power comes so low on the list.
The reason is simple: Mirio goes blind, deaf, and loses the ability to breathe when he phases.
Basically, the only thing he feels is a vague sense of falling, which, combined with his
tendency to phase into the ground, sounds like pure torture.
Spinner's quirk lets him stick to walls, but that's because he's basically a lizard man.
In a world where kids have navel lasers and sugar-powered super-strength, the ability
to look like a big lizard just seems sad.
Some of the other characters have inherited animal features, but they also get cool powers
of their own.
Tokoyami has a bird head, but he also has a shadow creature that can fly him around.
Koda has a rock head, but he can talk to animals.
Even another mutant, Tsuyu, has a long tongue, acidic vomit, and can camouflage herself with
her surroundings.
Compared to any of those, Spinner's ability to look like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle
original character that you drew when you were a teenager just doesn't measure up.
The world of MHA is full of high-tech gadgets and weird technology that heroes and villains
can use if they weren't lucky enough to be blessed with an exceptionally useful quirk.
Of course, someone has to design those interesting gadgets and weapons, which is where Mei Hatsume
comes in.
She attends U-A to learn how to make Support Equipment, MHA's in-universe term for utility
belts, costumes, and super-weapons.
It's no surprise that Hatsume's focus is on the Support side of things since her quirk
is pretty boring.
Hatsume's Zoom quirk lets her vision zoom in any object that she's looking at up to
five kilometers away.
It's not a bad quirk, but it's not really a good one either.
No wonder Hatsume chose a career path that has almost nothing to do with it.
Even in his old age, Gran Torino has proved himself to be a powerful combatant multiple
times, and his Jet quirk seems to be a major factor.
It allows him to shoot air from the soles of his feet, giving him incredible speed and
agility as he dashes around and delivers high-velocity punches.
So why isn't he higher on this list?
As it turns out, that speed has to come from somewhere.
Gran Torino's quirk shoots air out of his feet, but it's the same air he uses to breathe.
That's some incredible lung strength, but it means that there's a hard limit to how
often and how much he can use his quirk.
Still, you could say that his quirk is a breath of fresh air compared to the more outlandish
ones out there.
Shoto Aizawa, a.k.a. Eraserhead can temporarily halt the activation of quirks as long as he
keeps his eyes open after looking at a quirk user.
As soon as he blinks, the effect ends.
It doesn't affect mutant types like Spinner or Ojiro, but it would stop Todoroki from
controlling fire and ice.
That's a pretty useful power in the world of My Hero Academia, which is packed to the
brim with quirk users of all type.
The ability to shut down a villain before they start doing their villainous acts is
solid, but that's all it does.
Ultimately, a quirk that depends so much on the presence of other quirk users to be effective
makes this a middle-of-the-road power.
Who among us can say that they've never stomped through sand castles or miniature cities pretending
to breathe nuclear fire while humming Blue Oyster Cult's second-best song?
It's an enticing fantasy, and one that the superhero Mt. Lady can live every day.
As you might expect from her punny name, Mt. Lady can grow to giant size with her Gigantification
quirk.
Unfortunately, it's only half as useful as it sounds.
Mt. Lady can grow to giant size, but she doesn't have the ability to grow and shrink; she only
has the ability to grow to her giant size and back to regular human size.
That seems like a recipe for disaster in metropolitan areas, and the lack of control means that
Gigantification is unlikely to land in the top spot of any Most Desired Superpower list.
Still, we'd be lying if we said that we didn't want to act out our own Tom Hanks in Big fantasies:
"I wish I were big."
We already have at least one super-speedster in the My Hero Academia cast in the form of
U-A student Tenya Iida, but his Engine quirk is still revving up in the anime.
Instead, his brother, the pro hero Ingenium, has a much more powerful quirk at the moment.
Instead of powerful engines on his legs like his younger brother, Ingenium has engines
on his arms, letting him blast through the air like the world's fastest Naruto Runner.
In other words, he's both fast and furious.
"I live my life a quarter-mile at a time."
In the world of My Hero Academia, quirks usually come with a drawback or weakness, but that's
not something Shoto Todoroki has to worry about.
His quirk allows him to control fire and ice to an almost unlimited extent.
On the right side of his body, he generates ice, while on the left, he can control fire.
Granted, overusing one half of his body reflects that increase or decrease in temperature onto
his own body, but just switching to the other half regulates his own temperature back to
normal.
Even in the world of My Hero Academia, Todoroki's quirk is absurdly powerful.
In fact, its existence is explicitly due to active effort on his father's part to engineer
an ultra-powerful heir.
However, putting Todoroki's tragic superhero origin aside, we can't find any particular
issue with this ultra-powerful quirk.
We're not going to play hot and cold here; this quirk is worth getting fired up about.
Copycat characters have existed in superhero fiction almost as long as superpowers.
From Taskmaster to Amazo, there's just something innately satisfying about seeing someone copy
and combine familiar superpowers in new ways.
Since My Hero Academia never shies away from a good superhero fictional trope, there is,
of course, a copycat quirk wielder.
The catch is that he's pretty undeniably heroic, even if he's kind of a jerk about it.
Neito Monoma is a U-A student with the ability to copy the quirk of anyone he touches.
He can copy up to four abilities, and use any one ability at a time for up to ten minutes
before he needs to physically touch them again.
While that's not much use out in the real world, Monoma's Copycat quirk is extraordinarily
useful in the quirk-filled world of My Hero Academia.
Being able to copy up to four powers at a time with a touch makes Monoma an incredibly
dangerous opponent in a melee.
What's more, knowledge of his quirk only makes him more dangerous, since he can throw in
bluffs to confuse clever enemies.
The only real drawback to his quirk, besides the time limit, is that he can only make use
of quirks that don't depend on external power sources.
Fat Gum's Fat Absorption quirk wouldn't be possible for the skinny Monoma, and so on.
A balanced diet is important to living your best life.
For Tamaki Amajiki, a balanced diet is particularly important to living his best superhero life.
As the hero Suneater, Tamaki has the ability to manifest characteristics of whatever he
eats as a part of his own body.
That means that if he eats clams or octopus, he can turn parts of his body into tentacles
or clam shells.
If he eats a bird, he can grow wings and fly.
The size, number of manifestations, and exact features of the food he wants to use are entirely
up to him.
While it's an incredibly weird-looking quirk to have, it's undeniably a useful one.
Hit up an all-you-can-eat fish buffet, and you could probably swim faster than Michael
Phelps.
Eat a few plates of chicken, and you can, uh, kind of halfway fly and hop around.
You get the idea Tamaki's power isn't even limited to conventional food, either.
At one point, he eats some crystals created by another quirk user in order to make his
own flesh into crystals.
Best Jeanist's Fiber Master quirk allows him to control individual threads of fiber.
That makes him nearly unstoppable against anyone wearing clothes, which is nearly everyone.
"He's a never nude."
"Is that exactly what it sounds like?"
"Tobias suffered from a rare psychological affliction of never being able to be completely
naked."
Best Jeanist has some minor drawbacks to his quirk: for one, the type of thread influences
how easily he's able to control it.
Still, it's one of the weirdest and most useful quirks in all of the My Hero Academia universe.
Unless he goes up against a supervillainous nudist colony, Best Jeanist is one of the
best.
Twice can make an exact duplicate of anything as long as he knows the exact measurements.
He's limited to two doubles at a time, and those doubles are slightly weaker than the
real things, but they still have their own abilities and will.
That means that, functionally, he doesn't have any limits when it comes to cloning himself.
He can clone himself, and then that clone can clone himself, and then that clone's clone
can clone himself, and so on infinitely.
Beyond its use in making personal armies, it's the perfect cooperative quirk with other
villains, since Twice can make a clone of himself and a clone of another villain, which
can likewise repeat seemingly infinitely.
In fact, the only real reason that My Hero Academia isn't entirely about the world's
heroes uniting against this seemingly ultra-powerful villain is that Twice spends most of his time
completely insane as a result of cloning himself too much.
He didn't know if he was the original clone and spent years worrying that he was just
his own doppelganger.
As horrifying as that might be, there's a pretty easy solution: just write numbers on
all your clones' heads, and it doesn't seem like identity confusion will ever be a problem.
“They look exactly like us, so in order to avoid confusion I'm going to mark us each
with a red X right now."
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