Danjuro Tobita

The mustache is the thesis: a waxed handlebar above a trimmed medium beard, with slicked-back hair curling at the front. The heavy black lines around his eyes look like eyeliner and are in fact marker, applied by his own hand, much as La Brava does hers.

He has been through several versions of himself. At eighteen he was clean-shaven with shorter hair, in a black school jacket and white shirt, with a ribbon tie in royal red. At twenty-two, scraping by on part-time work, the hair had grown out, the facial hair had come in scruffy, and he lived in a grubby dress shirt and dark suspenders. The villain wardrobe that followed was pure theater: a black jacket with oversized collars and coattails, loose white pinstriped trousers, two gold-buckled belts, purple gloves with lighter knuckles, a wool scarf to match, white cuffs, brown laced shoes, and a white cane tipped in gold.

Prison let the hair run wild, and by the Final War it had gone spiky and unkempt. He fought in the old costume stripped down, jacket and cuffs and gloves abandoned, a baggy dark blue undershirt in their place, the scarf knotted tight with a loose thread trailing past his belt. Eight years on he is groomed again and dressed like a man with an office job: white collared shirt, gray vest and trousers, a wedding band on his left hand matching Manami's.

He is unfailingly courteous while committing crimes, calm in front of several heroes at once, and given to flourishes such as pouring tea from a kettle held above his head, spilling most of it. Under the manners is a man who does not think things through. He once blocked a Pro Hero from a rescue while trying to help. His videos unsettled the people he meant to inspire. He never grasped what breaking into the Culture Festival would actually do to U.A. He talked himself into exposing his own identity to Izuku Midoriya. Asked to defend any of it, he cannot: not to his high school counselor, not to Izuku, not to Hound Dog on the day he surrendered to shield La Brava.

Money bores him. What he chases is a name that outlives him, hence the recordings, hence the stated goal of carving himself into history so that someone later might consider how he lived and want the same. He admits he is selfish and claims he will trample anyone else's dream to get there, with one exception: La Brava, for whom he will sacrifice himself outright. Arrested at last and told his life could still be turned around, he wept, which gave away how much of the boy who wanted to be a hero was still in there.

Mikuzu Prison did not dampen the theatrics. He chased model-prisoner status, added mustaches to the shirt and teddy bear designs he was assigned, and was moved to tea-pouring duty, which he took as a great honor and which fellow inmate Ichi Anrakuki quietly explained is the lowest job in the building. When Ichi fell from the scaffolding, Danjuro caught him with his Quirk, forfeited his parole for the violation, and regretted nothing, reasoning that a gentleman extends a hand when it counts and that this was how he would earn his way back to La Brava. During the breakout he stood alone against a yard of inmates set on running wild, frightened and hopelessly outnumbered, remembered what Gori and Izuku had told him, and stopped every one of them. Then he decided to repay Izuku by fighting in the Final War.

Elasticity makes anything he touches stretchy, bendable and bouncy, air included, and he cannot switch it off; the effect only decays with time. Elasticized air becomes an invisible circular membrane he can bounce from, hide behind, or shove around the field. Because the trigger is a touch and the medium is often invisible, opponents rarely see it coming, especially through his constant showman's gestures. He proofs his own clothes with it so nobody can yank his cape and unbalance him. He fights to escape rather than to injure, never at full strength, and the six years he spent uncaught measure how well that works. La Brava's Love can push him into Lover Mode, which the pair keep as a last resort.

His signature moves are one idea dressed several ways. Gently Rebound hangs a barrier in the air that blasts back whoever runs into it. Gently Trampoline turns the ground into a launcher, for enemies or for his own travel. Gently Sandwich pins a target beneath stacked barriers. Gently Super-Lover, powered by Lover Mode, spreads a trampoline wide enough to catch a floating island. He also carries an elaborate knife for his robberies.

Planning is where he is genuinely dangerous. His U.A. infiltration accounted for hero patrols in the sky, so he traveled on foot; for agency density and traffic, so he chose a route timed at sixty to sixty-five minutes; for Hound Dog's nose, so he and La Brava would smear themselves with dirt and leaf litter; and for the sensor-based barrier, which La Brava would switch off through the school network. He even scheduled a café stop. A chance meeting with Izuku undid all of it. In the fight that followed he repelled the One For All holder twice, evaded him through a construction site, rigged a steel beam to look like it would crush a bystander so the boy would stop, and threw up membrane shields, until Izuku turned those same membranes against him. Lover Mode brought him close to overwhelming a Deku going all out, and he still lost to St. Louis Smash, then framed his surrender as simple trespassing and claimed he had brainwashed La Brava so she would not be treated as a willing accomplice. Izuku later called him the hardest opponent he had faced, because he understood him.