Term · My Hero Academia
Quirk
Eighty percent of the world is born with a superpower, at which point it stops being a superpower and starts being a demographic.
In Otakana the clue reads: What this world calls a superpower
- Type
- Term
- Series
- My Hero Academia
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
A quirk is an inherited ability that usually surfaces around age four, and four people in five have one. That number changes what a power means. Quirks get catalogued at school, registered with the state, listed on job applications, and used to sort children into careers, so the setting reads less like a comic book and more like a country with an unusual civil service.
The clever design choice is that most quirks are useless in a fight. One classmate hardens her hair, another fires tape from his elbows, and a professional hero's power is being a large quantity of cement. Heroes are the people who found a violent application for an ordinary trait and then trained it for a decade, which is why the series spends far more time on technique than on raw strength.
The story starts in the other twenty percent. Being quirkless here is not neutral, it is a diagnosis, delivered by a doctor reading an x-ray of a child's foot, and it shuts doors before that child has done anything at all. Kohei Horikoshi builds the entire premise on it: the boy everyone wrote off is the one the strongest hero alive picks.
Spelling QUIRK
Five letters, QUIRK, and it is one of the few answers in this library that refuses a Japanese reading. The original term is kosei, meaning individuality, and the English localization chose quirk over a literal translation. The Q is the gift. Almost nothing else in the answer list wants one, so landing it confirms most of the row, and QU always travels as a pair.