Is Deku’s Gearshift Too Similar to Luffy’s Gears? (& How Are They Different)

In the recent issues of Shounen Jump, My Hero Academia has been a huge success as it reaches its final climax. In the midst of one of the series’ most anticipated battles, something happened to the main character that caught fans’ attention, the reveal of Deku’s last quirk, Gearshift. As we see it in action, it has an extremely noticeable similarity to One Piece’s Luffy ability Gear Second. But how exactly are Deku’s Gearshift and Luffy’s Gear Second different from each other?

Deku’s new quirk Gearshift allows him to change the speed at which something moves, may that be him or anything he comes in contact with. On the other hand, Luffy’s Gear Second makes his body move faster and thus capable of landing quick attacks. In the end, these powers may look similar at first glance but actually, work in different ways.

Even though My Hero Academia’s author seems to have got great inspiration from One Piece, he did put a bit of his own style and imagination into it. So much that it’s worth going deeper and going into detail about each one of these abilities, to see how exactly each one of them is unique.

Izuku Midoriya’s Gearshift

As introduced in chapter 368, Gearshift was originally owned by the unnamed second user of One For All, who only used it to boost the speed and trajectory of bullets fired by him. After being merged with One For All and resting for many years, the quirk powered up, leading up to Deku being able to use it freely. But how does he actually take advantage of his new quirk?

As already explained, Gearshift is capable of changing the speed of anything at this point, which Deku carefully uses to boost his own movement and the speed of his punches and ultimate attacks. He first reveals this power with what brought out the similarity between it and Luffy’s ability, his ultimate move called Transmission.

After using this quirk to quickly rush towards Shigaraki, Deku punches him several times, with each hit increasing Gearshift`s effects on Shigaraki. Each of these increments in speed is denominated by him as gears, going from Low Gear to Top Gear.

However, this is not the only way he utilizes this power as he also combines it with one of his other quirks, Fa Jin. For those who are not familiar with it, Fa Jin allows the user to stock kinetic energy to later boost their attack when releasing this energy.

This is such a great increase in force that it allows Deku to reach an attack power similar to 100% of One For All while using just 45% of it. Together with Fa Jin, Gearshift makes it possible for Deku to not only hit his opponents faster than ever but also at his strongest. This might is even described to be correspondent to 120% of One For All’s power and being capable to be applied to any of Deku’s ultimate moves, which he does in great style.

One of All Might and Deku’s most famous attacks, Detroit Smash, goes to a new level while being affected by Gearshift and Fa Jin and turns into another already iconic move, Detroit Smash: Quintuple. With this move, Deku quickly hit Shigaraki with five successive Detroit Smashes, a power so strong capable of even warping reality itself.

All of this takes our protagonist to the next level and is able to stand even higher than the number one villain but does this quirk make him stand alongside Luffy? Not really, as similar as they might sound, Luffy’s power in a whole different way.

Luffy’s Gears

In One Piece, since the beginning, Luffy was capable of extending any part of his body due to it being made out of rubber, after eating the supposed Gomu Gomu no Mi Devil Fruit, which he used to create attacks to fight enemies. But after coming face to face with great danger, Luffy realizes he has to find new ways to utilize his power in order to grow stronger. This brings us to his abilities called Gears.

Luffy has created many Gears throughout the series, with each one bringing great excitement to fans. What they do is in some way improve Luffy’s abilities and take full advantage of his malleable body, such as making his arms bigger by inflating their bones or turning into a bouncy man by inflating his muscles. However, the one that sounds similar to Deku’s Gearshift is Luffy’s Gear Second.

With Gear Second, thanks to the entirety of his body being made out of rubber, Luffy boosts his blood circulation, making it so that oxygen and nutrients flow much faster through his body. This leads to a great increase in power and speed, turning Luffy into a stronger version of himself.

The rise in speed and its denomination make Gear Second sound very similar to Gearshift, while in reality they work very differently, but do reach an almost identical result. Luffy reaches his potential by using his rubber veins and organs to accelerate his blood, thus accelerating himself, whilst Deku can accelerate (and decelerate) anything he comes in contact with, not only himself.

But they even have the same disadvantages, as it appears Deku faints or else after using this quirk for more than 5 minutes and Luffy also grew tired initially after using Gear Second, besides supposedly shortening his life span.

In addition to it, Luffy’s powers led him to greater strengths such as Gear Third, which he would turn any limb extremely big by blowing a huge quantity of air into his bone, and Gear Fourth, by this time blowing air into his muscles would turn into different forms like Bound Man, Tank Man and Snake Man. Most recently he also showcased Gear Fifth, which he turns into his most free form and has no limits as to how to approach his enemies, only his imagination.

In the end, Deku’s new quirk does seem to have taken inspiration from Shounen Jump’s most popular series, but added his own twist to it. With these two great and abnormally strong main characters, the industry of anime and manga has a lot to look forward to as these series come to a close.