Ryu Yoshida

A white beak and a pale white body give Ryu the silhouette of a cartoon dinosaur rather than a working physician. Teal skin covers him, and four dark blue plates sit in a row across the crown of his skull. His eyes are unusually large and run together into one joined shape, each carrying a small pupil of muted green. Over a dark blue shirt he wears a doctor's coat.

The timeskip ages him visibly. Eight years past the Final War, wrinkles gather across his face, the beak has turned craggy and closer to a bird's, and the plates on his head have shrunk and slid back toward the rear of his skull.

Ryu carries himself as a steady professional, and the story treats his good intentions as a given. Courage backs them up. When a mob converged on Central Hospital, he lined up alongside the rest of the staff and physically blocked the way instead of retreating.

By the epilogue his name carries real weight. Eight years on, he is known as the doctor who pulls back the patients everyone else has written off.

As head doctor at Central Hospital, Ryu inherited the wounded once the Paranormal Liberation War ended. Heroes and hero course students arrived in numbers, many of them needing surgery. Shota Aizawa came through in rough shape, and Ryu noted that the outcome could have been far worse without the people who put his safety first. Later, once Yuga Aoyama stood revealed as the mole All For One had planted, Ryu's team examined the boy for a hidden explosive of the sort planted in Kaina Tsutsumi. Nothing irregular turned up in his brain or his biology, which told Shota that All For One had held Yuga through threats and fear alone.

The Final War brought the fighting to his doors. Central Hospital housed the dormant Kurogiri, so heroes took position there while Shuichi Iguchi rallied roughly fifteen thousand Liberation soldiers and sympathetic mutant civilians to storm the building and free him. Two hundred defenders and police were divided and overwhelmed. When the crowd finally broke inside, it stopped short at the sight of Ryu and the hospital staff standing between them and the patients. The civilians lost their nerve and gave up, leaving Spinner to push through alone and reawaken Kurogiri.

Afterward, Ryu operated on Katsuki Bakugo and then delivered the verdict. Surgeons had joined a large mass of bone fragments back together, but the right arm would never return to normal and no further operation would improve it, with rehabilitation no guarantee that he regains its use. Ryu raised prosthetics of the kind Rumi Usagiyama received, an option Katsuki refused because his Quirk fires from the palms, and because Izuku had never had one. Rehab was capped at low-level exercise: the boy's heart had been destroyed, Edgeshot's suturing was the only reason it beat again, and how he kept fighting or traveled so far afterward remains unexplained. Eight years later Ryu ranks among the most prominent doctors in Japan, with a middle school student hoping to follow the same path.