My Hero Academia: Shigaraki’s Quirk, Explained

gamerant.com:

Quirks in My Hero Academia can easily make or break a hero or villain. The quirk certain characters are born with can even affect what path they follow in life. Particularly, people born with dangerous or evil-seeming quirks seem destined for a life of crime, even if they might not originally want that for themselves.

Such was the case for a young Tomura Shigaraki, who dreamed of being a hero, but eventually grew to be the main antagonist of the series. All because of the dangerous quirk he was born with. As he got older, Shigaraki's quirk has become more complex and even more dangerous. So just how does this devastating ability work?

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Shigaraki’s quirk is known simply as ‘decay’. As the name implies, it is a quirk that allows its user to decay or destroy anything that they lay their hands on. The speed and ferocity at which the quirk decays things is dependent on the user’s emotional state, with strong, chaotic emotions causing the quirk to act more fiercely. The decay effect has been shown most often to reduce its targets to dust, but has also been shown to be able to reduce living targets to a pile of blood and body parts in its weaker form.

Decay is an interesting quirk due to the way it changes over the course of Shigaraki’s life. It’s less that the quirk evolves or that he learns new ways to use it, and more that he simply remembers its full potential and chooses how much of it to tap into at any given time.

When he was just 5 years old, Shigaraki first manifested the quirk, killing his dog in the process. He then accidentally decayed his sister, causing him to panic and his quirk to go out of control and start decaying his family’s backyard. Before long, the