Hitoshi Shinso

Fatigue is the first impression. Dark bags sit under purple eyes with white pupils, thin and faintly triangular, angled downward with no lashes showing and usually only half open. Above them, indigo hair erupts in messy tufts around his head. He is fairly tall, his teeth are notably straight, and around the Provisional Hero License Exam, Class 1-A remarked on how much muscle he had packed on in the interval since the Sports Festival.

His Joint Training gear was a prototype built from the winter U.A. PE uniform, dark blue with thick white lines tracing a U and an A across his torso and legs and a red-framed white marking on each sleeve, worn with green and white sneakers, a detachable mouthpiece called the Artificial Vocal Cords, and Eraser Head's style of Capturing Weapon around his neck. The finished costume that followed the Paranormal Liberation War is black: short-sleeved shirt over a fishnet undershirt, four small speaker-like buttons at a belt, gray shoulder pads, fishnet arm sleeves, purple elbow pads, knuckle guards fingerless at index and thumb, black trousers, purple thigh and calf straps with another speaker device at the side, and white boots tipped in purple. Eight years on he is taller, the hair grown long and wavy as a nod to Eraser Head, and the costume has gone streamlined and ninja-like, with a much longer capture weapon.

Quiet and blunt describes him most of the time, yet he can strike up a conversation with anyone, which is exactly the skill his power runs on. He knows which words pull a reply out of someone, and he has no scruples about winning dirty.

Being treated as dangerous shaped the rest. A lifetime of people flinching at Brainwashing and judging him for a Quirk he was simply born with bred real resentment toward those whose abilities look heroic by default, and he told Izuku Midoriya that someone that blessed could never understand living with something like his. What he wants, more than anything, is to be a Pro Hero, partly to prove every doubter wrong and partly to overtake the students who were handed the path he had to fight for. He claimed no interest in friends. He ended up with them anyway, Neito Monoma, Denki Kaminari and Izuku among them.

Brainwashing forces a target to obey his commands, but only opens if they answer him out loud, and only if he chooses to trigger it. He can hold several people at once while activating it on one at a time. Originally his victims could not manage anything requiring higher brain function, such as speaking or recalling a name, until training pushed the Quirk far enough that he could order people to repeat his words, which is what baited All For One into a sting. Megaphones and similar devices defeat it, since those devices turn what he says into an electronic signal and strip the trigger out.

Combat was the gap. He relied purely on the Quirk until he committed to transferring into the Hero Course, at which point Eraser Head, who saw himself in the boy, began training him in secret. The Joint Training Battle showed the result: he brainwashed Jurota Shishida immediately, fumbled his first attempt at the Binding Cloth style because his reaction speed lagged, then, once Denki's plan split the opposing team, used it properly to blindside and stun the rampaging Jurota long enough that Tsuyu Asui could hurl Hiryu Rin into him and take the round. He complained afterward that barely half his training had been usable; Shota's answer was that a student who could already do everything would not need a teacher, and that mastering his own capture weapon from nothing had taken six years. His teamwork stood out just as much, with the voice-shifting function of his gear and his ultimate move Persona Chords, which mimics other people's voices to draw answers out of enemies and leave them exposed to his teammates.

The intelligence was there from the start. In the Sports Festival's obstacle race, he had other students brainwashed into hauling him forward, conserving every bit of stamina. He provokes on purpose, too: he needled Izuku about Mashirao Ojiro's withdrawal and mocked the Tail Quirk by calling him a monkey, and Izuku took the bait and would have been walked out of bounds had One For All not fired on its own. His kit is the non-electric Artificial Vocal Cords and a Capturing Weapon whose cloth is a carbon-nanofiber weave over steel wire alloy, good for grabbing, restraining and moving.