Oboro Shirakumo

Light blue hair, wavy and swept upward away from his head with two ear-length tufts hanging loose to frame his face, topped a tall young man who wore excitement as a default setting. His blue eyes tilted inward in semicircles and spent much of their time squeezed shut above a wide, teeth-bearing grin, and a small white bandage sat across the bridge of his nose.

For hero work he wore a closed blue gi secured by a knot-tied black obi, black fingerless gloves and a black undershirt, under a dark brown aviator jacket lined with white fur and printed across the back with the character for cloud. An aviator hat in blue, mufflers oversized, left an opening for his hair to push through, beige goggles with silver lenses covered his eyes, and black boots with white accents finished it. A red sheath on his back held a deep red quarterstaff, and an orange gourd that worked as a speaker hung from his belt. When he briefly surfaced inside Kurogiri years afterwards, his features were unchanged, though smoke swallowed everything around them.

Jovial and casual, Oboro joked constantly and had a fondness for innuendo. The energy ran close to Hizashi's, if never quite as loud. Protocol meant little to him and shame less: he would come into class through a window or change clothes in front of everyone without weighing who might mind, and reprimands rolled straight off him. Beneath the clowning sat the trait that defined him, an unforced altruism that pushed him to go the extra mile whenever anything or anyone needed help.

Oboro studied in U.A.'s Class 2-A beside Shota Aizawa and Hizashi Yamada, training toward a professional licence under the hero name Loud Cloud, and worked out of the Purple Revolution Agency. His Quirk, Cloud, produced clouds dense enough to touch and strong enough to carry considerable weight; he rode them through the air and used them to store objects. Cloud Cover, his ultimate move, dropped a small cloud into an opponent's line of sight to blind them while he raised larger ones to hide inside. Alongside it he fought with the deep red quarterstaff, which he handled with real skill.

He was seventeen when a villain named Garvey killed him during a Hero Work-Study. All For One recovered the corpse and converted it into a Nomu, Kurogiri, built to mind Tomura Shigaraki.

Kohei Horikoshi created the character to give Shota a figure comparable to Mirio in his past, working with Hideyuki Furuhashi on the backstory that My Hero Academia: Vigilantes would eventually tell; his presence forced the series to shift Shota's and Hizashi's roles to keep the balance. Betten Court designed the hero costume and goggles, whose resemblance to Shota's began as a coincidence in the drafts and was written into the story once Furuhashi noticed it. The costume, the quarterstaff and the Cloud Quirk all gesture at Sun Wukong of Journey to the West. His surname joins the characters for white and cloud, and his given name carries the sense of hazy.