While everyone has the potential to constantly improve, not all manga allow their characters to reach infinity. That would simply make them too powerful. To tell a compelling story, characters will often be given natural limits to their abilities that they have to either overcome or deal with. There are a lot of ways to handle this narrative device, which has led to different incarnations of power ceilings throughout manga, especially shonen manga.
These varying power ceilings can be observed well throughout Weekly Shōnen Jump’s extensive collection of battle manga. Characters in these series constantly train to grow stronger and improve until they’re more than capable of handling whatever life throws their way; after all, effort is a core theme of the magazine as a whole. As the magazine has been saturated with battle manga over the last 50 years, the art of establishing power ceilings has been practiced, refined, and improved.
Limitless Power Ceilings
Some shonen manga make it seem like characters can keep growing stronger forever. Through intense physical training and determination, they can achieve levels that make them exponentially stronger than anyone around them. This kind of potential through training often disregards normal physical limits and depicts them as something meant to be surpassed; in doing so, one can achieve superhuman feats of strength, speed, and durability and just go up from there. Even the march of time is just a minor inconvenience for people like this. As long as one has the willingness to strive for more power, one can strive for it endlessly.
This is how series like Dragon Ball (1984) and Saint Seiya (1986) produced some of the strongest protagonists known to mainstream audiences. They trained until they had the power to destroy planets, solar systems, galaxies, and even universes. At the very least, their series introduced threats powerful to do this and made the main characters strong enough to beat them. Even with all of this power, however, the characters still have the potential to grow much stronger than they are.
Of course, Dragon Ball’s power ceiling did get slightly limited over time. This is why in Dragon Ball Super (2015), characters like Krillin and Goku can be hurt by guns and other conventional weapons if they don’t keep up with their training; this is in sharp contrast to the very start of Dragon Ball where they were too strong to ever be more than stung by a bullet. This retcon might have been made so that they could still be considered susceptible to interesting but otherwise negligible threats.
Near-Limitless Power Ceilings
This need for characters to still be susceptible to minor threats is what led to series with near-limitless power ceilings. These series, as with those like Dragon Ball and Saint Seiya, make it seem as though its characters can grow infinitely strong as long as they train or seek to improve. However, they can still be injured by conventional weapons and even weaker opponents if they’re not careful. It’s also debatable whether these characters have the ability to destroy a planet, much less the universe; for how strong they might become, it wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination. At the very least, it doesn’t seem like their rate of growth will slow down any time soon.
The near-limitless power ceiling can be observed in works like One Piece (1997), Toriko (2008), Yū Yū Hakusho (1990), and Bleach (2001); Naruto (1999) arguably encroached on this territory by the end of its run. These series were likely inspired by Dragon Ball and the like, which is why their characters have infinite potential to gain power. At the same time, however, their stories wouldn’t work if the characters destroyed the world they were standing on; they can’t just always take their business to another world, either. For the story to work, most characters’ power levels have to be gauged against each other rather than by how much destruction they cause. Other than that, however, they can just keep getting stronger.
Not-So-Limited Power Ceilings
Nowadays, the practically-limitless power ceilings have mostly been replaced by power ceilings that seem limited at first, but aren’t really. In series with these kinds of “limits,” characters seemed to have a pretty steady rate of growth and achieving exponential new levels of power seemed impossible. They also seemed less likely to reach the destructive potential of even the near-limitless characters. Their stories focused on engaging the audience with battles of wits and skills rather than big, flashy attacks. However, there’s often a seemingly-inevitable desire for bigger, cooler-looking attacks, so the characters’ potential for growth gets increased accordingly. This kind of growth can be observed in series like Naruto, Medaka Box (2009), and Black Clover (2015).
A common trend of the not-so-limited power ceiling is how physical training is handled. At first, it seems like one’s physical body can only go so far without some kind of special power. However, it’s eventually revealed that one can get strong enough bodies to challenge even those with godlike abilities.
This might have been what happened with My Hero Academia (2014). At the start of the series, Deku could only ever reach peak physical condition without a Quirk. However, as the series progressed, more characters were introduced who could somehow keep up with his Quirk-enhanced abilities, even if their own Quirks had nothing to do with enhancing strength. This is to say nothing of characters like the Nomus and Shigaraki who have superhuman strength even when they’re not using Quirks at all. It’s probably best to assume that the potential for physical growth was retconned to be more like something out of Naruto or Black Clover.
Limited Power Ceilings
While most series can’t resist the appeal of flashy battles over strategy-based battles, there are series that can balance this a little better. This results in a strict power ceiling where characters have a lot of potential, but they’re unlikely to be exponentially stronger than their opponent save for a few rare exceptions. They’re instead forced to rely on skills, abilities, and tactics to give them an edge. Hunter x Hunter (1998) was ahead of its time as it employed this type of power ceiling as far back as the late 90s and early 2000s. A more popular modern example wouldn’t come about until Jujutsu Kaisen (2018). Demon Slayer (2018) and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (1987) also fall into this category to an extent; they’re also timeless classics, but they also make their main characters much closer to mortal men.
It’s important to emphasize that the characters in these kinds of series are still more than capable of superhuman feats. It’s just that they shouldn’t be expected to use those superhuman feats to give themselves an exponential edge as they would in other series. In Hunter x Hunter, for example, Kurapika was able to use his chain abilities to beat Uvogin despite the latter’s physical advantage. However strong a character may be in these kinds of series, it won’t make a difference if they can’t also think of a way to best their opponent.
One of the lower kinds of power ceilings in shonen manga are those that are closer to human than superhuman. These are difficult for fans to judge in terms of power as the characters’ feats can change from normal to slightly superhuman at a moment’s notice. Besides JJBA, this is common in series featuring samurai like Rurouni Kenshin (1994) and Gintama (2003). These characters are susceptible to the same mortal injuries as the average person, except when they’re not.
The potential for power ceilings and how high or low they can go is just as great as the potential of characters aiming to breach them. Different writers can add all sorts of subtleties and nuances that change people’s understanding of power and what it takes to be strong. Thus, it’s important for everyone to consider their own limits and what they need to do to overcome them.
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