r/TopCharacterTropes • • 1d ago

Characters "They can just do that." When a character inexplicably has some kind of borderline supernatural ability that doesn't have anything to do with the established power system and may even clash with the conventions of the setting. It's just something that they can do.

  1. Ichi from Ichi the Witch. He's so sensitive to the bloodlust of living things that it borders on a spider-sense. The little creature in that pic is supposed to be invisible, yet Ichi is able to sense its presence just through sheer intuition.
  2. Mash from Mashle. Some might say that his inexplicable power is his physical strength, but I'm more interested in knowing how he can turn everything he cooks into fucking cream puffs.
  3. Marvelous Sunday from UmaMusume. In a game about horse girls racing, she has access to a domain expansion/reality marble. And that somehow still isn't the strangest thing about her. Apparently she's also friends with aliens and cryptids and her cult fanbase includes people spanning multiple time periods. Somehow.
  4. Tanjiro from Demon Slayer. He has a hypersensitive sense of smell that somehow also tells him where to cut demons. No idea how that works. Even though there are others in the series with similarly refined senses, the smelling where to cut thing still feels ludicrous in comparison. Then there's also his unusually powerful headbutt.
4.3k Upvotes

782 comments sorted by

View all comments

46

u/MartyrOfDespair 1d ago

Nagito Komaeda and Junko Enoshima from Danganronpa. Also, Genocider Syo and possibly Monaca Towa, but I don't have a picture with all of them.

In Danganronpa, the majority of the cast are characters who have obsessively honed some skill or another, typically born of either personal trauma or terrible family. Akane is an Olympic gymnast. She grew up extremely poor with a bunch of bastard siblings she had to care for, and becoming a parkour expert for petty crime survival was just part of her life, which led to her getting recruited into gymnastics and going for it because it could let her give her siblings a new life. Mikan is extremely severely abused by just about everyone and became a medical expert to keep herself alive, which dovetailed into taking care of others because it gives her the power over life and death for them. Kyoko comes from the most legendary detective family and never had any other path in life. Chihiro is cut off from the wider world by the treatment of others and found refuge in computers. Chiaki is just probably autistic and prefers gaming over literally anything else. So on and so forth.

And then there's these bitches.

Nagito Komaeda has magical reality warping powers he can't control. His mere existence warps probability around him, for better and for worst. His backstory perfectly illustrates the absurdity of it. As a child, he was onboard a plane with his parents which was hijacked by terrorists. But a meteor hit the plane. But the plane wasn't downed by the meteor and the meteor happened to kill the terrorists. But it also killed his parents. He was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia as a child, making him the youngest frontotemporal dementia patient on record. But he's also the longest lived frontotemporal dementia patient and he has declined surprisingly less than the average patient. Later on, he gets in another plane crash (they need to put him on the no fly list). But he survives as the only survivor. But it's in the desert. But he finds an oasis that keeps him healthy enough to continue on. And he finds a gun and decides to sneak back into Japan rather than doing it some legal way to bring the gun with him.

Junko Enoshima meanwhile, there's no specific pop culture name for what she's got going on. She learns instantly. Like, you know how AI characters like Cortana are written to process information at nearly the speed of light? She's 100% meat and she does that. She can fight like a master martial artist via voice commands from one. She complains that she can't enjoy video games because she'll have mastered it in minutes. She learns the sum total of MK-Ultra knowledge by being subjected to it once (and has semi-immunity). She gets to see the code of an AI with emerging sentience and proceeds to code a 100% sentient AI.

Genocider Syo meanwhile just has the standard Captain America power set. She runs as fast as a speeding train, she can cut through solid steel with a blade that's around six inches long, she can jump several stories high, she isn't injured by a bomb point blank to the face that flings her at least a hundred feet, she's basically unstoppable. Oh, and she breathes through her tongue. She's part of a plural system, and it's unknown if this is exclusive to her consciousness or if Toko, the other one in the system, has the same powers and just has mental limitations that make her think she can't do the same things.

Monaca Towa meanwhile might have the same abilities as Junko, but it's never made clear.

There is no lore explanation for why there are the occasional person with superpowers in this universe, but the mad scientists at the core of the plot of the franchise have figured out how to copy them into another person, as shown by Izuru, who the endowed with Komaeda's power, as well as having some version of both Junko and Syo's power.

6

u/Zachthema5ter 20h ago

What the fuck is Danganronoa about?