Ryuko Tatsuma

The reptilian details come first and they are deliberate, a running nod to what she turns into. Her eyes are thin and yellow, tilted inward, split by slit pupils, and her teeth are noticeably sharp. Blonde hair falls to her chin, held back with a headband, and a long fringe drapes over her right eye to hide it.

Her costume is a dark red qipao trimmed in yellow at the collar and the centered chest closure, with pale green scale texturing over the shoulders. Both sides of the skirt are slit, and a yellow motif near the hem suggests claw marks. She pairs it with black knee-high boots, a small bagged strap on her left thigh, and long white sleeves that float free of the garment, running from wrist to just under the shoulder with raised tabs on the upper outer edges. A green scale-textured headband carries four large silver claws that shield her face on the right, small black dragon wings jut out behind her skull, and gold spiked cartilage piercings decorate her left ear.

Activating her Quirk swaps her body for a large winged dragon, pale gray scales covering the limbs, the wings, and the back of the neck while the rest keeps her usual coloring in skin, hair, and eyes. The costume stays visible apart from the boots, and the facial claws relocate onto her right hand. By the timeskip, wrinkles have settled beneath her eyes, her ears carry more piercings, a spiked piercing sits under her lip, and her hair is shorter at the back, long bangs now falling where the silver claws once sat. The costume survives largely intact, now sleeveless with green scale trim, a red headband, and two silver claws capping the index and middle fingers of her right hand.

Ryuko is gentle and self-effacing, quick to credit others and uninterested in being thanked for it. Combat does not rattle her composure. When she spots ability in someone, she trusts them with the hard job rather than shielding them from it.

That modesty runs deep enough to look like self-punishment. She took sole blame for her drop to tenth on Japan's Hero Billboard Chart and said plainly that she should have performed better. Asked for a speech in that tenth-ranked capacity, she admitted she would have turned the rank down had refusing been an option, since failing to save someone left her feeling unworthy of it.

Children bring out something softer in her, visible in how she teaches and looks after her trainees. Learning that Kai Chisaki was harvesting his own so-called daughter to manufacture Quirk-Destroying Drugs shook her, and she told the other heroes outright that getting Eri out came before anything else.

Her Quirk, Dragon, converts her into a large dragon, and everything else follows from that: a sizeable jump in strength and durability, jaws and claws that do serious damage, and wings for flight. Her hero costume is built to enlarge with the transformation and shrink back down afterward, and she wears claw guards sized for the dragon form on her head, donning them as she changes. Her recorded finishers are Dragoon Punish and Wing Slash.

The strength is genuine heavy-class power. She caught a punch from Rikiya Katsukame, an enormous yakuza whose own Quirk boosts his strength, then drove him into the ground. Later, with her stamina already drained, she still grappled with him and knocked him back hard enough to hurt him, notable because Rikiya had just walked off Nejire's strongest hit moments earlier. In the Paranormal Liberation War she paired with Enji Todoroki to double team a Tomura Shigaraki running at seventy-five percent, holding her own in the air for a long stretch before going down. She came around again and helped Izuku Midoriya pin him, until the villain recovered his Quirks and put her out with a shockwave.

Blunt force barely registers on the dragon. Weakened by Rikiya's Quirk, she absorbed Nejire's strongest attack as it slammed the two of them into the ground, a blow that knocked Rikiya cold while she took the shockwave directly and walked away undamaged. In the war she also endured strikes from a body-enhanced Tomura whose power rivaled All Might's.