Highlights
- My Hero Academia explores the notion of using superhuman powers for good, asking viewers to ponder the potential of abilities beyond human limits.
- Mashirao Ojiro, a Class 1-A student, showcases his Tail quirk as a powerful weapon, combining combat skills with his unique ability to knock down villains and create strategic moves.
- Ojiro faces challenges in battle due to the predictability of tail-users, but develops ultimate moves like Tornado Tail Dance to improve combat abilities.
Inspired by American comic books, My Hero Academia ushers in a cast of young children gifted with superhero-like powers at birth, and gives them the opportunity to save the world. Mangaka Kōhei Horikoshi covers a question that has its audience pondering: “What does one do with powers that go beyond human limitations?” For those who choose the side of good, the U.A. Hero Academy welcomes those seeking to become the next pro heroes in My Hero Academia. Such is the case for Class 1-A, where the main cast of heroes in Izuku Midoriya, Katsuki Bakugo, and Shoto Todoroki can be found. The trio of aspiring heroes join a class full of potential, with the intention of earning good grades and impressing enough people during their training to earn a chance to study alongside one of the pro heroes.
Among the students of Class 1-A, Mashirao Ojiro immediately captures the viewers’ attention once they look past his humanoid form and discover his tail. Ojiro is a stoic and quietly-intense character who takes up the sixth seat in Class 1-A. Known as a hard worker with a humble nature, Ojiro takes both his studies and his battle training as seriously as some of the top students in the school, appearing disappointed at anything that doesn’t meet his high expectations. His desire to remain out of the spotlight and place as little focus onto himself has often garnered the commentary that he is plain, which often upsets Ojiro, but his good-natured attitude and willingness to help others and reassure them during times of doubt have placed him in a positive light among his classmates and fans of My Hero Academia.
Mashirao Ojiro’s Quirk: Tail
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First Appearance |
My Hero Academia, Episode 5, “What I Can Do for Now” |
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Debut Date |
June 9, 2018 |
Introduced in episode 5, titled “What I Can Do For Now”, Ojiro joins the cast of 20 students in Class 1-A with hopes of one day becoming a pro hero and obtaining their provisional hero license. While he doesn’t get much attention at the start of the series — something he’d appreciate — Ojiro earns plenty of opportunities to show off his Tail quirk. Since birth, Ojiro has been blessed with a tail that grows from the back of his body, despite possessing no other animal-like traits or parts. As he grows older, Ojiro’s tail takes on a larger appearance, growing both in length and girth while growing hair at the tip. Ojiro’s quirk allows him to use his tail as a weapon and a way to swing around obstacles.
Ojiro’s Tail quirk contrasts the many emitter quirks in My Hero Academia, as it focuses less on using flash and aura to overcome villains and more on adding to his intensity during combat. Ojiro’s tail can be used as a weapon, swinging it around to knock over villains or binding them tightly, but he can also use it to grasp onto objects and flee from a scene. Ojiro’s mastery of his abilities early on makes him one of the more promising students in the U.A. Hero Academy, indicating that despite his quirk’s limitations, it’s his ability to use it efficiently during battle that pushes him beyond primary limits.
Mashirao Ojiro’s Fighting Style With Tail
Unlike many students at an early age, Ojiro has excellent combat skills and is a worthy fighter on his own merit. His serious and humbling personality leads into his karate style and disciplinary play during a fight. Ojiro is a black belt in karate, and is perfectly capable of taking down enemies in hand-to-hand combat. Due to Tail being more of a close-ranged quirk, Ojiro is excellent at battling enemies up close and using his karate mastery to get the upper hand. Adding his tail to the mix, Ojiro has a perfect weapon to knock his villains off balance, bind them tightly to restrain them from doing any more damage, or even use it as a way to dodge or block certain attacks.
Ojiro’s tail meshes extremely well with his karate fighting style, as he incorporates it in his combination of attacks while relying on it to block surprise attacks. This makes him a worthy opponent against an opposing quirk user who may have extra limbs, as his tail can actively swipe away the additional attacks while concentrating on launching his own. The tail is also quite powerful, as Ojiro has used it to knock villains into the air or tightly squeeze them into submission, and he’s also been known to come up with unique moves that make his tail a devastating weapon. Even without his tail, Ojiro is tremendously powerful and is one of the best hand-to-hand combatants of Class 1-A, finishing seventh in the Quirk Apprehension Test and earning notoriety for his active fighting abilities.
Tail’s Usage In Battle
Combining his mastery of the karate style and using his Tail quirk to mix things up, there are many examples of Ojiro’s successful results in My Hero Academia. During the U.S.J. Incident, when the League of Villains breached the training grounds of the students, Ojiro was able to overpower multiple low-ranking members of the group, using his tail to keep waves of villains at a distance while handling the few who got in close. While his style of combat is exceptional at handling situations quickly, Ojiro struggles to strategize on the fly and can often be seen falling into traps and becoming overwhelmed. He counteracts this minor weakness by developing new quirk moves, such as Swamp Smack Spin, to evade attacks and get himself out of some sticky situations.
What Ojiro gives up in battle intelligence, he more than makes up for with power and technique, and an excellent ability to combine his quirk utility with other heroes. During the battle on Nabu Island, Ojiro teams up with Fumikage Tokoyami to take on multiple villains, including Chimera and Nine. His understanding of when a situation is dire propels him to jump into battle and use his expertise with karate to help his allies whenever they are in need of help. Ojiro was one of the first to discover the power of Class 1-C student Hitoshi Shinso, learning of his Brainwashing quirk and warning Midoriya of its dangers in their U.A. Sports Festival encounter. Realizing this connection prior to his own battle against Shinso, Ojiro withdrew from the festival despite being perfectly capable of using his Tail quirk to overpower his opponent.
The Downside of Tail
During his demonstration of fighting prowess and quirk utilization, Ectoplasm noted the predictability of his movements and taught Ojiro that tail-users are often easy to read due to their lack of unorthodox movement. Part of Ojiro’s training was to incorporate more fluidity into his movement during a fight, while not relying solely on his tail to give him momentum. Ojiro often focuses on projecting himself forward with his tail to give him extra speed while chasing an enemy, but this has often placed him in momentary lapses of danger. Due to him being airborne and unable to evade an attack in the follow-through, Ojiro has often been caught and discarded regardless of how much momentum he had built.
In order to combat this weakness, Ojiro began to experiment with several different ultimate moves, deciding on the Tornado Tail Dance and Swamp Smack Spin. The former grants Ojiro an incredibly powerful move that allows him to spin around and knock over anything in his surrounding area, while the latter is a defensive move that can pull him out of danger at a moment’s notice. The versatility of his ultimate moves has given Ojiro some extra power to his quirk, and his continuous training to work on his movement and placement leads into a positive growing phase for the young hero. Where he’ll go next relies completely on his combat skills evolving enough with his Tail quirk to make him one of the greatest close-range fighters of Class 1-A.
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