A variety of Japanese anime series, American comic books and movies explore the theme of humanity gaining supernatural powers and what humanity's relationship to those unusual gifts would be. Many people daydream about reading minds or flying like Superman, but these gifts can easily become a curse, and anime heroes and villains alike know it.
The short 2015 anime Charlotte has remarkable overlap with My Hero Academia, taking place in a world where more and more youths gain supernatural abilities beyond their control, and this could become a real problem. So, the protagonist, Otosaka Yu, borrows All For One's and Flect Turn's best strategies not to conquer the world, but to save it. Yu single-handedly proves to Flect Turn that freedom doesn't have to come at the cost of human lives.
Otosaka Yu's Quest To Free Humanity Of Quirks
When Charlotte begins, the protagonist, Otosaka Yu, seemingly has the ability to possess other people for five seconds, and he tries to abuse this power to impress his crush. His life takes a turn when the student council members of the Sea of Stars academy recruit him so he can assimilate into a school where everyone else has supernatural gifts as well. Later, Yu learns that his ability doesn't just allow him to temporarily possess people -- his true ability is to steal the other person's "Quirk" permanently and add it to his repertoire. In that sense, he is Charlotte's All For One, but unlike that terrifying supervillain, Otosaka Yu has more mundane interests, such as saving the lives of his classmates and beloved younger sister when trouble strikes.
Finally, Yu must carry out his final mission -- to travel the globe and rid everyone of their "Quirks" before world governments can kidnap any more kids and experiment on them as living weapons. These gifts are actually a serious burden and may easily go out of control, so it's time to get rid of them entirely. Yu quickly steals a Filipino boy's ability to sense other meta-humans from afar, then uses that ability to track down all the rest and steal their powers, one by one. This puts enormous strain on Yu, whose mind and memories are warped by the burden, but he doesn't stop until he claims the last ability and declares mission complete. Interestingly, this was also the goal, though not the method, of the villain Flect Turn in My Hero Academia: World Heroes Mission.
How Otosaka Yu Humanizes Flect Turn
Despite his darker moments in Charlotte, Yu is a substantial improvement over the likes of All For One and Flect Turn, even if he has the methods of the former and the goal of the latter. But even if he has overlap with those two My Hero Academia villains, a few key differences set them apart. To begin with, Yu's goal is to prevent the exploitation and abuse of people who have meta-abilities, allowing the world to regain its balance.
This sets him apart from All For One, who steals Quirks not to make society more just but to dominate it utterly. All For One aims to become a criminal emperor, and rearranging people's Quirks on request allows him to recruit thousands of loyal followers. Yu would never dream of doing that with all his stolen abilities -- he's doing this to help others, despite this being a huge burden on his body and mind. Nonetheless, he persists so that he can save humanity.
Yu also subverts Flect Turn by having the same goal but different methods. Both characters aim to rid the human race of burdensome meta-abilities to restore the balance, but Flect Turn, who projects his own insecurities onto the world, recklessly launches a plan that will outright kill 80% of the world's population. His methods will rid the Earth of Quirks by killing every Quirk bearer where they stand -- an extremely heavy-handed and genocidal method that only a true villain would think of. Flect doesn't care who would die so long as he gets what he wants.
By contrast, Yu eliminates "Quirks" with surgical precision, ignoring non-bearers while harmlessly robbing meta-humans of their gifts in person. Even if he could, he would never resort to genocide to wipe out the meta-humans. As a shonen protagonist, he believes in not just victory but winning the right way. A tainted victory is no victory at all, and that makes him different than the villainous Flect Turn.
