Superpowers I: Characterization

I'm one of those weird people who are kind of obsessed with how superpowers are presented in stories. It's always fascinating to me how society reacts to people who can do shit like fire lasers out of their eyes. I want to talk about how superpowers can be used to characterize their users.

The unfortunate first example I will provide is my eternal enemy, Boku no Hero Academia. In short, it is a manga written by Kohei Horikoshi about a world filled with superpowers called Quirks, superheroes and supervillains who use them, and a boy with none at all. Izuku Midoriya is not born with a quirk, but is given one by All Might, the world's #1 superhero. One for All is held by both of them, but looks completely different when each of them uses it. All Might inflates into a muscle man when he uses the quirk, and this symbolizes him being the symbol of peace, while his deflated form symbolizes the fragile reality of the situation, where his body is slowly falling apart and he's likely to be killed along with his Quirk if he doesn't pass it down. Izuku doesn't have any of that, because he's no symbol. Not once does his use of One for All do anything close to what All Might did. Instead, he looks positively electric. If I was pretentious, I'd say this signifies that Izuku lacks a grasp of his power but slowly builds it up, just as humanity slowly grasped the power of electricity. There are, obviously, more obvious examples, like Katsuki Bakugo's explosive Quirk and personality, or Shoto Todoroki's fundamental division between what he wants out of his heroism and what his dad wants out of his heroism, or even how Ochaco Uraraka's relatively harmless seeming quirk being combined with the exploitation of physics and sick judo moves tries to symbolize her quietly indomitable will (before Horikoshi forgets about her). Notably, almost everyone is born with whatever Quirk they use, meaning the equivalence between their Quirk and their character is NOT diegetic.

The brilliant Hunter X Hunter, however, does away with that to some extent. Every single person in that universe has access to the power of Nen, the aura flowing through their body. They slowly develop the ability to envelop themselves in Nen, suppress or amplify their output, and, eventually, manifest it in a way unique to them. No Hunter has complete control over what sort of special ability (Hatsu) they get. Instead, they are born with a natural tendency towards one specific "type": enhancement, emission, transmutation, manipulation, conjuration, and specialization. Hisoka, a prominent character, attempts to provide a personality heuristic to determine someone's Nen type proficiency, but this is not especially accurate. Nen seems to represent resolve. Gon's special abilities are just the raw manifestation of his biggest proficiency and the two categories next to it. He can punch hard, slice hard, and shoot hard. This represents the fact that his only real reason for being a Hunter is to learn why his dad wanted to. However, once he meets Kite and begins trying to get him back, his resolve greatly increases (not a good thing!) and he becomes vastly more powerful. Killua, on the other hand, explicitly uses his memory of being tortured by his family to transmute his Nen into electricity. He is quite literally weaponizing his trauma against his family. I don't need to say anything else about that. So close is Nen to resolve that one explicit way to improve your Nen output is to restrict yourself. Kurapika, the series tritagonist, will die if he ever uses some of his powers outside of the people he swore to kill. You can also improve your Nen output by choosing to undergo some kind of risk, showcasing almost haughty confidence.