Characters / EDENS ZERO: Shiki Granbell

Main Character Index
Crew of Edens Zero (Shiki Granbell, Shiki's Companions) | Crew of Edens One
Oración Seis Galáctica (Associates) | Interstellar Union Army
Grand Shiki Cosmos (Sakura Cosmos [Blue Garden, Sun Jewel]) | Others
The Final World

Spoilers for the first 140 chapters (Seasons 1 and 2 of the anime) are unmarked. Expect unmarked spoiler names as well. You Have Been Warned!

Shiki Granbell

Voiced by: Takuma Terashima, Yurie Kozakai [child] (Japanese), Sean Chiplock, Ryan Bartley [child] (English) ^{Foreign VAs}Tim Schwarzmaier, Derya Flechtner [child] (German), Felipe Vidal (Latin American Spanish), Ricardo Escobar (European Spanish), Benjamin Bollen, Estelle Darazi [child] (French), Mosè Singh, Pietro Novara [child] (Italian), Felipe Drummond (Portuguese), Siwaphan Bunyaratphan (Thai)

^{Click here to see his appearance after the Nero 66 arc (SPOILERS)}

"I don't follow your rules. My friend is more important. And I'm not some hero fighting for justice... If you hurt my friends...I'll show you the kind of Demon King I can be!!"

The adoptive grandson of Demon King Ziggy, and the sole human inhabitant of Planet Granbell, where he was raised in an abandoned theme park run by robots. He gets swept up on a space-faring adventure with Rebecca and Happy to explore new worlds across the cosmos and make as many friends as he can along the way, but a lifetime without human contact has left his social skills somewhat lacking. To overcome this, he has made it his life's goal to find the legendary goddess Mother, using the Edens Zero—his birthright from his late grandfather—to do it.

The Ether Gear that Shiki inherited from Ziggy, "Satan Gravity", lets him alter gravity for himself or any person or object he chooses. This affords him a wide range of skills such as making things lighter or heavier, running across walls, sliding down floors, "falling" up and sideways through the air, hurling compressed gravity bullets, and crashing into his enemies like a comet.

General Tropes

A - K

• Absurd Phobia: Shiki is terrified of insects and anything that reminds him of them. This isn't absurd on its own as the fear of bugs is pretty common, but take into account that Shiki is a superpowered martial artist who regularly fights giant mechanical enemies and alien creatures, and it gets a little silly.
• Accidental Pervert: He occasionally gets into compromising situations with Rebecca and Homura, such as unintentionally looking up Rebecca's skirt when she's Going Commando nonetheless, or is politely told by Homura to look away when they're having a genuine bonding moment while she's bathing in a spring.
• All-Loving Hero: Deconstructed. Shiki cares for humans and robots alike, and believes that anyone can become friends no matter how much they may think they never will. As the series progresses, however, he meets a few truly unpleasant individuals such as Drakken Joe and Shura that challenge just how far he's willing to stick by his ideals, eventually leading to a pivotal moment where Shiki firmly rejects Shura's friendship for his shameless prejudice and attempted genocide against machines, declaring that he won't sacrifice his own beliefs for a friend who refuses to change his own.
• Always Save the Girl: Mother presents Shiki with two choices: saving her and the universe at the cost of the lives of the friends he lost in previous universes or letting her die and allow the universe to run out of Ether to keep all his friends alive in Universe Zero. Shiki chooses the latter option because he refuses to sacrifice any of his friends for the universe. Then it's subverted when Shiki decides to Take a Third Option to save Mother and the universe as well by planning to use the Chronophage to revert Mother back to the planet Earth.
• Always Someone Better: Prior to leaving the Sakura Cosmos, Shiki's able to cruise through most of his fights with relatively little difficulty, with his wins against his most challenging opponents mainly boiling down to figuring out their weaknesses and/or weakening them to a point where he can prevail. After that, however, he's shown to not only be completely out of his depth against the likes of Justice, who gives him the first definitive Curb-Stomp Battle of his life, but also incredibly inexperienced compared to Gravity Ether masters like Ziggy and Xenolith, whose scale of power spreads across entire planets. Once he undergoes training right after, however, he starts quickly closing the gap until the three-year Time Skip, where he's joined the ranks of Justice's peers, the Oración Seis Galáctica.
• Audience Surrogate: Due to his Fish out of Water nature, he stands as the target of the explanations about the EDENS ZERO universe.
• Barbarian Longhair: He is introduced with long, messy, greasy hair that's never been cut in his entire life, since none of the robots he grew up with ever saw it as a problem. It bugs Rebecca so much that she cuts it off in his sleep, giving him his standard Shonen Hair look. He later gives this hairstyle to his Digital Avatar on Digitalis as a memento to his old home, but it gets chopped off again by Jamilov's scythe.
• Barrier Maiden: A male example. According to Noah, Shiki's Satan Gravity makes him the "key" to Rebecca's Cat Leaper, and only by killing him will her power awaken. Drakken succeeds in World No.29 in an attempt to extract Rebecca's power, but it backfires when Rebecca escapes into World No.30.
• Beware the Nice Ones: He's an emotionally sensitive All-Loving Hero who wants to become everyone's friend, but he will never tolerate anyone who harms his friends or makes them cry.
• Bodyguarding a Badass: He feels this way about Rebecca, who recruits him as her "bodyguard" on her adventures, despite being a perfectly capable fighter on her own with her Happy Blasters.
• The Captain: He inherits the Edens Zero from his grandfather, and the crew—including the Four Shining Stars and the humans who join—are at his command. At first, he doesn't take being captain all that seriously outside getting the final say on where to go and who stays on the ship, but as the crew faces more harrowing conflicts, he's forged into a more mature and responsible leader.
• Chaste Hero: Downplayed. Having never been taught the proper behavior around women prior to meeting Rebecca, Shiki questions the need for them to change and sleep in separate rooms. Despite his naivety, he does expresses perverted thrill when his female crewmates provide Fanservice.
• Clothing Damage: When using the full extent of his Ether Gear, the gravity around him becomes so intense that it rips his shirt to shreds until he's a Walking Shirtless Scene. It can also peel apart his shoes, tatter his pants, and even strip away the bandage that Shiki uses to conceal his facial scar.
• Combat Pragmatist: Whenever he's faced with an enemy or obstacle that is immune to his gravity powers, he resorts to changing gravity for himself or something in his environment, such as when he makes the ground heavy enough to make a sink-hole to escape getting pinned down, or busting up his own hand to land a normal punch with extra force to damage an Ether-resistant robot.
• Corrupt the Cutie: It's implied that Weisz had a hand in Shiki's growing awareness of the opposite sex, since it doesn't kick into high gear until after Weisz officially sticks around.
• Country Mouse: Having spent his entire life on an island filled with century-old robots, he has trouble grasping the basics of modern space travel, and is mesmerized by the universe's more up-to-date, futuristic technology.
• Covert Pervert: While he usually seems innocent concerning sexual attraction towards the opposite sex, Shiki excitedly asks his female crewmates to put on a see-through maid uniform. He also shares the same aroused reactions to the Fanservice around him as Weisz.
• Dark Is Not Evil: His Overdrive turns his clothes jet black and his hair an eerie white, living up to his title of Demon King, but he's motivated by nothing but righteous fury when he uses it.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: He serves as one for the Stock Shōnen Hero, though it leads to a Decon-Recon Switch: his obsession with The Power of Friendship makes him come across as more of an annoying and creepy weirdo than an inspiring figure; his stubborn determination leads him into dangerous situations that cost his or his crew's lives in other timelines; and his all-loving nature is frequently challenged by villains who are so despicable that it makes him question where to draw the line between befriending them or not. Nevertheless, while he learns to accept that his way doesn't always work, he still earns himself a loyal group of True Companions by being a good and earnest person in a universe chock full of corruption and prejudice.
• Determinator: He doesn't let anything stop him from fighting to protect his friends. This is Deconstructed, however, in that some situations can't be won simply by being determined enough, and that this attitude can backfire on him. Drakken Joe proves this when he shoots Shiki in the head for standing up to him and refusing to grovel.
• Endearingly Dorky: Downplayed. His awkwardness and obsession with making friends tend to disturb or annoy people, but those who can put up with his quirks wind up finding him fun to be around once they get to know him better.
• Energy Ball:
  • His Gravity Cannon is a ball of concentrated gravity that he hurls at enemies. He's later inspired by Rebecca's fighting style to compress these balls into smaller bullets that he fires from his knuckles like a shotgun.
  • Shiki's ultimate technique, Black Sky, is this on a greater size than Gravity Cannon, and requires Shiki to strengthen his heart through comprehending the weight of others' lives to use.
• The Engineer: Subverted. He thinks the robots on Granbell need him around to make sure they're in working condition, even though his skill amounts to Percussive Maintenance at best, but they reveal later on that they have an automated self-repair function, and led him to believe he was the one fixing them as they didn't have the heart to tell him their batteries were Secretly Dying, and that there was nothing he could do about it.
• Enhanced Punch: His Gravity Fist strikes his enemy with such strong gravitational force that it completely shatters the ground hundreds of feet around him.
• Et Tu, Brute?:
  • Subverted when the other robots on Granbell suddenly turn against him and Rebecca, which they claim is because of a virus that's causing them to hate humans. It turns out they were faking the whole thing to save him, though even before learning the truth, Shiki holds nothing against them.
  • Subverted in the Digitalis arc, where he's shocked and hurt when Homura reveals herself as a traitor...mere moments before she's exposed as an imposter by the real Homura.
  • Played straight when Ziggy comes Back from the Dead and becomes the Big Bad, renouncing Shiki and everything he ever stood for. Shiki feels conflicted by this betrayal, logically understanding the threat Ziggy poses, but still struggling to grasp why his beloved grandfather would do such horrible things. It takes Ziggy destroying Nero 66 and indirectly causing Witch's death for Shiki to finally stop viewing him as a grandfather and start viewing him as an enemy.
• Even the Loving Hero Has Hated Ones:
  • Labilia Christy immediately earned Shiki's disdain the second he witnessed her bullying Rebecca and Happy. He also doesn't tolerate her flirting with him due to the fact that she still acts like a haughty brat to his friends.
  • Although Shiki starts off wanting to be friends with everyone regardless of them being human or machine, Shura is the first person Shiki outright refuses to befriend, because Shura is a homicidal maniac who is planning to commit a robot genocide in the Aoi Cosmos. The things Shura does after Shiki spurns him—from forcing him to fight brainwashed Robot Soldiers, to kidnapping Witch and torturing her to within an inch of her life—only reinforce Shiki's hatred of him.
• Eye Scream: During his rematch with Shura in the Nero 66 arc, Shura uses gravity to rip out Shiki's left eye and crush it in his hand. This carries over to Universe 3, where Sister fits Shiki with a fully functional prosthetic.
• Face of a Thug: Downplayed. Weisz describes him as having the face of a Beetle Maniac, but Shiki is extremely kind and friendly. He's also afraid of bugs, ironically.
• Famed In-Story: Chapter 1 ends with an assertation that Shiki's name will eventually be known across the cosmos. By the Time Skip in Universe 3, he's quite notorious as one of the Oración Seis Galáctica.
• Fantastic Fighting Style: His "Magimech Attack" style, which is only possible for a Gravity Ether Gear user such as himself.
• Friend to All Living Things: Exaggerated; he considers himself a friend to any sentient being that wouldn't normally be considered "alive", including robots and digital lifeforms.
• From Zero to Hero: He starts out as an outcast from human society, but the first chapter indicates that Shiki's name will eventually become known across the universe. After the three-year Time Skip, Shiki and his crew have saved multiple planets and in one Universe, he is recognized as a member of the Oración Seis Galáctica for his feats.
• Future Me Scares Me: Shiki is very shocked and horrified to discover the evil Ziggy is his future self from Universe 3173, and rejects the truth because he simply can't imagine himself turning so wrong. However, this becomes subverted when he learns Ziggy was under another villain's control all along.
• Goggles Do Nothing: Starting with the Guilst arc, Shiki periodically wears goggles for no reason in particular, never actually using them. He also wears them in Mashima HERO'S, which helps him stand out from Mashima's other, similar-faced characters.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: He has a small scar on his left cheek, which he keeps covered under a white strip, emphasizing his nature as a bit of a scrapper, but otherwise a good kid. His removal of the strip in Universe 3 symbolizes his growth into a more serious and mature young adult while retaining his sense of goodness.
• Gravity Is Purple: Zig-Zagged. His gravity fields are often colored in the manga with a deep, bluish violet in official artwork, and his Overdrive changes his green Ether lines to purple. In the anime, however, his gravity is often depicted as the same shade of green as his Ether Gear, with some exceptions like his Gravity Cannon and Gravity Impact.
• Gravity Master: His Ether Gear lets him alter the gravity of just about anything to a certain degree, allowing him to float, collapse, run along walls, and "fall" sideways across great distances when in midair. He can also create balls of gravitational force to launch at enemies, an anti-gravity field to repel projectiles, and becomes like a black hole in his Overdrive form, pulling the surrounding environment towards him. His gravity also has an effect on intangible things such as memories, causing others' thoughts to "fall" into him, or into their own minds when Rebecca resets the timeline.
• Handshake Refusal: He does this to Shura when he offers Shiki his hand in friendship, smacking it away when it becomes clear that even if they become friends, Shura won't stop his crusade to rid the universe of robots.
• Happily Adopted: The robots of Granbell looked after him since he was a baby, and he continues to regard them as his family, even after they drive him away from the planet since they convinced him they were just suffering from a virus.
• He Is All Grown Up: In Rebecca's "dreams" of the Bad Future, Shiki is noticeably brawnier with thicker biceps and broader shoulders, while his eyes are narrower and his jawline is less rounded, all showing his departure from being a Wide-Eyed Idealist; Rebecca picks up on his maturity despite their bleak surroundings, saying that he looks "kinda hot". This look and attitude become a reality after the three-year Time Skip in Universe 3.
• Heroic BSoD: At the end of the Nero 66 arc, Shiki is sent into a deep depression over Witch's death, staying inside his room in a Troubled Fetal Position and unable to eat for two days straight. It's not until he sees how far Rebecca has pushed her body fruitlessly trying to undo Witch's death with Cat Leaper that Shiki understands he has to accept what happened and move on.
• Hollywood Genetics: The black-haired Shiki has little to no resemblance to his biological family: Regret and Leonard, the green-haired humans who became the Four Shining Stars' Witch and the Four Dark Stars' Wizard, respectively.
• Hurricane Kick: His Gravity Windmill Kick is a justified example, as he lightens his own personal gravity to stay in midair.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: During his fight with Wizard on Lendard, Wizard seems to cripple Shiki with his Drain Ether, ripping him out of Overdrive state. After some banter and Wizard preparing the finishing blow, Shiki suddenly powers back up and rips a hole through Wizard's side, revealing to the shocked android that he was conserving his full strength for fighting Ziggy, and that at first he was only using one-tenth of his true strength to fight Wizard.
• I Am Who?: Shiki is astonished to learn that his grandfather was not merely a theme park animatronic, but a well-known interstellar traveler who found him on his return journey after failing to find Mother, and left him quite the inheritance of a massive warship and a stewardess who regards him as "the new Demon King".
• Ideal Hero: He's a naturally heroic and good-hearted guy with strong morals, always jumping to fight the bad guys.
• Idiot Hero: He's a bit of a dunce when it comes to social interaction and complicated words, at one point asking if he could break open a window in outer space so he can shout goodbye to his friends on his home planet. Most of this can be chalked up to how sheltered he is, having grown up among robots designed to run a fantasy theme park.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: He desperately longs to make new friends after spending over a decade living among robots who encouraged him to do just that, but his commitment to the robots holds him back from doing so. Once he gets chased away by his old friends, who knew he'd waste his life trying to repair them if he knew they were dying, he officially makes it his Goal in Life to make as many friends in the universe as he can, with Rebecca and Happy starting as his first.
• Improbable Age: He's the captain of a massive warship and has gathered a crew that have an impressive array of abilities despite only being about 15. In Universe 3, he stands as one of the most powerful known outlaws in the cosmos by age 18, making him the youngest to hold the title.
• Innocence Lost: At the outset of the series, Shiki's a naive kid who just wants to find a legendary space goddess as an excuse to go on a fun adventure and make 100 friends. With every new planet he visits, however, he's exposed to the horrors of prejudice, war, and powerful forces who would gladly engage in both at once. This forces him to mature from a hobbyist explorer into a responsible leader who puts the safety of his friends, and eventually the entire universe, above his own wants.
• Instant Costume Change: His Overdrive transforms his standard outfit into a sleeveless longcoat and removes his facial patch. Exiting Overdrive not only returns his clothes to normal, but also restores the patch.
• Ironic Echo: When Homura is in a Heroic BSoD over Valkyrie's death, Shiki helps pave the road to her recovery when he reminds her that she'll be able to move forward as long as her friends are around. Rebecca later reminds him of this when he finds himself in the same boat after Witch's death, but by this point, he's struggling to take his own advice and is convinced that it was the worst thing he could have told Homura in her situation.
• It's All My Fault: In the Nero 66 arc, Shiki blames himself for Rebecca pushing her body to the brink trying to rewind time to undo Witch's Heroic Sacrifice, as Rebecca couldn't bear seeing him so depressed over Witch's death.
• It's Personal: Defied in regards to his fight with Ziggy. Despite Ziggy being the indirect cause of Witch's death and the loss of his eye, Shiki refuses to be blinded by revenge and vows to stop him simply because it's the right thing to do.
• Killing Your Alternate Self: Shiki winds up killing one of his own selves from another universe. More specifically, it's Ziggy, his own adoptive grandfather, who is actually Shiki with Identity Amnesia.

L - Y

• Last of His Kind: Shiki is the last surviving human from Earth, the planet that became Mother.
• Legacy Character: After Shiki receives the Edens Zero from Elsie, Witch officially acknowledges him as the late Ziggy's successor as the Demon King. This becomes a point of confusion when Ziggy comes Back from the Dead, though by that point, Witch simply starts calling Shiki and Ziggy by name.
• Lightning Bruiser: Shiki is easily the fastest, hardest-hitting, and toughest member of the team thanks to his Ether Gear. He creates massive craters with his punches, can slide and fly around fast enough to catch up to hoverbikes, and has taken a number of attacks from bounty hunters and criminals.
• Logical Weakness: Shiki's powers act wonky underwater since gravity and buoyancy are two opposing forces.
• Loser Protagonist: He's a castaway Raised by Robots who starts at the bottom rung of an adventurers guild, where everyone besides his closest friends think he's a total nutcase for claiming to have seen Mother.
• Mad Libs Catchphrase: Being a Naïve Newcomer, he tends to consider anything new and mind-boggling like space, ninjas, and aliens to be "awesome".
  "X is/are awesome!"
• Magnetic Hero: His kindness and willingness to befriend anyone regardless of their race ends up winning over a number of people once they get over his social quirks. Lampshaded by Rebecca, who is perturbed that Shiki managed to make two new friends in the brief time she was kidnapped on Guilst.
• Maou the Demon King: Inverted. Shiki gets the title of Demon King from his grandfather, who was a robot playing the role of the Demon King at a medieval themed amusement park, but Shiki is actually The Hero. It takes him a while to notice that the title of "Demon King" doesn't sound very heroic, but fully embraces it when Witch explains it stands for the "King of Magimech" who shares Ether with machines.
• Meaningful Name: Discussed by Holy when she tells the girls of the Eden Zero that the collective name of the four cosmos is the "Grand Shiki Cosmos", suggesting that he was deliberately named after it.
• Meaningful Rename: Since Shiki doesn't know his own last name, if he has one at all, Rebecca decides to register him into Shooting Starlight as "Shiki Granbell", naming him after his home planet.
• Mentor's New Hope: After how his previous student Ziggy turned out, Xenolith hopes Shiki won't fall into The Dark Side once he decides to teach Shiki the ways of Gravity Martial Arts.
• My Future Self and Me: At the climax of the Lendard arc, Shiki learns that Ziggy—the one who raised him since he was a baby—is actually his own future self from Universe 3173. He rejects it at first because he refuses to imagine becoming an evil, human-hating despot, but becomes more willing to accept the truth when it's revealed that Ziggy was being controlled by someone else, though Shiki's still weirded out by the idea that he's been calling himself "Grandpa" all this time.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: The final arcs begin with The Reveal that Shiki's gravity resonated with Rebecca's unawakened time powers the day they first met, which caused his Ether Gear to go haywire and slam him to the ground in front of her while he's trying to fix Granbell's giant cat robot. The same thing happens to them all over again when they meet again in Universe Zero, this time leading them to remember each other from the previous world.
• Mysterious Past: Much about Shiki's life before he was found by the Demon King and raised on an abandoned robot planet remains a mystery, especially since he is recognized by a being believed to be the goddess of the cosmos.
• Mythical Motifs: Demons, being the grandson of Ziggy, the Demon King, a title that is passed on to him and an Ether Gear called 'Satan Gravity'. This is furthered in his Overdrive, turning his hair white, his clothes black and manifesting black horns on his head.
• Naïve Newcomer: He reacts to every new person and place he comes across with total awe and wonder, to the degree that he fails to immediately read tense situations or danger. He firmly outgrows this by the three-year Time Skip, becoming a more grounded and highly experienced leader and warrior who takes his battle against Ziggy just as seriously as his voyage for Mother.
• Next Tier Power-Up: After regaining his memories of when he died and all the resulting grief his friends experienced in World No.29, Shiki unlocks his full Overdrive, gaining enough power that Weisz compares his gravity to a black hole and overpowering the previously unstoppable Drakken in the process.
• No Sense of Personal Space: Having never interacted with another human being in his life before meeting Rebecca, his first instinct upon meeting a new person is to squish their face, and boobs if they have them.
• No Social Skills: Since he grew up living among robots, he has no idea how to interact with real people. The scary and intense faces he makes, not to mention the unwanted touching, nearly drives away the first friend he makes.
• Not Quite Flight: Whenever he needs to get across long distances in a hurry, he leaps high into the air and changes his own personal gravity to "fly" by falling sideways.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: Towards the end of the Nero 66 arc, when Nero 66 is about to be annihilated by Shura's anti-matter bombs, Shiki is persuaded to put the crew's safety first and escape instead of trying his luck deactivating the bombs. Once they think they're home free, Ziggy scornfully announces they made the wrong choice and leaves them stuck within the range of explosion, forcing Witch to perform a Heroic Sacrifice that ends with her being Killed Off for Real. As revealed in the Lendard arc, this is subverted; the opposite choice would have not only ended in failure, but started a chain of events leading Shiki to become Ziggy, so Shiki actually escaped a worse fate by cutting his losses.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Shiki is normally an All-Loving Hero who treats his crew as his friends and family, but has an uncharacteristic outburst where he forces his authority as captain over Jinn in anger after being riled up by Shura kidnapping Witch, among other reasons. He snaps out of it almost immediately after Couchpo gives him a soft but firm scolding for talking to his friends like that.
• Otaku: He's a huge geek when it comes to fantasy role-play, likely cultivated by his home planet's LARP attraction. He also mentions Fantasy Character Classes when thinking about getting a whole party together for the voyage to Mother, and declares he's changed his job to "thief" when stealing Young Weisz's briefcase.
• Paradox Person: Shiki's entire existence is the result of time travel shenanigans. His original self died as a baby on a destroyed Earth 20,000 years ago. At some point, the Chronophage devored Mother's time and reverted back to Earth right after it was destroyed. There, Ziggy found the baby Shiki and took him to Granbell to raise him. Eventually, Shiki goes on a journey to space and gets involved in the Aoi War, and in Universe 2, he gets blasted to 20,000 years into the future, where robots find him and turn him into a robot to save his life, turning him into Ziggy. In short, Shiki exists because he was found and raised by an alternate future version of himself.
• Pointless Band-Aid: Ziggy placed a bandage on Shiki's left cheek to cover a wound when he was a kid, because he was worried that it would scar and make him look like a "loser". Shiki keeps it on even years later both to hide his scar and to remember Ziggy. He takes the bandage off when he decides to think of Ziggy as his enemy, while also symbolizing his loss of innocence and first step into proper adulthood.
• Power Dyes Your Hair: Shiki's black hair turns white when going into complete Overdrive.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: He gets a character-defining one when he faces Garrot and declares himself to be the Demon King for the first time, solidifying who he is after Mother wonders whether he'll be a legendary hero or a havoc-wreaking Demon King.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Delivers one to the immortal Drakken while about to finish him off. Downplayed since Drakken doesn't actually die, but is brought very close to it afterwards.
  Shiki: You've lived long enough. It's time for you to go to sleep.
• Prone to Tears: Shiki is such a pure and sensitive kid that he cries at the very thought of never seeing his friends again, or when he feels happy or sorry for them. He also cries when something reminds him of his home, his friends on Granbell, or his fear of bugs.
• Purple Is Powerful: He gains purple Ether lines when he transforms into his complete Overdrive state.
• Raised by Robots: He was raised from childhood by the robotic attractions and employees at the Granbell Kingdom theme park, with the one who first discovered him being his "grandfather", the Demon King. They were friendly with him and gave him a good home, but this meant he never really interacted with real humans until Rebecca came along. Once off planet, he has trouble adjusting to talking and meeting with other people.
• Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: His Gravity Fist Frenzy becomes this when used against a single opponent, delivering a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown in no time flat.
• Red Baron: The "Demon King". The Four Shining Stars already acknowledge him as this for being Ziggy's successor, but it becomes his universally known title by the time he is acknowledged as a member of the Oración Seis Galáctica.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Shiki's Satan Gravity has the power to pull in memories from previous timelines not just for himself, but for others around him. This is what allows Rebecca to retain her memories during her time leaps for the first time when she jumps from World No.29 to No.30.
• Scars Are Forever: He's had the scar on his cheek ever since he cut himself as a little kid, which is justified by how Granbell lacked the technology to completely heal his wound.
• Semantic Superpower: As Xenolith explains to Shiki, the true potential of Shiki's gravity powers lies above and beyond altering the weight of and attraction between others, instead using the properties of gravity in a figurative sense. By this point, he has begun to display this kind of power, which include "attracting" Rebecca from the future as a way to enable her Mental Time Travel; causing his and others' memories of past timelines to "fall" into the present, enabling Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory; and doing the same by making Drakken's childhood memories "fall" into his own mind as a form of Telepathy.
• She Is Not My Girlfriend: When Professor Weisz asks him if he's Rebecca's boyfriend, Shiki blushes and denies it. He doesn't seem to deny he has feelings for her, though.
• Shonen Hair: Shiki keeps his hair messy and spiky after Rebecca gives him his first haircut upon meeting him.
• Shoot the Dog: Despite obviously not wanting to, Shiki is forced in the Lendard arc to kill Ziggy, who asks him to do it after being freed from the true Big Bad's control, as it's the only way to prevent him from being controlled again.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: When Shura tries getting Shiki to be his friend on Nero 66, Shiki only agrees to accept on the condition that Shura must stop his plans of genocide against machinekind. Shiki turns him down the moment Shura tries getting him to consider why humans don't need "living" machines, refusing to sacrifice his own beliefs for the sake of friendship.
• Skilled, but Naive: He's already a capable brawler and skilled with his Ether Gear by the time he leaves Granbell, but living in a live-action roleplay paradise with nothing but cheery robots for company has left Shiki with No Social Skills and a wide-eyed outlook on life that butts heads with the cynicism of his friends and the challenges he faces. Once he fights in the Aoi War and sees first-hand the lengths certain humans and machines are willing to go to destroy each other, he loses his naïveté and develops into a highly experienced adventurer.
• Slide Attack: He can change his gravity to slide across the floor as if it were down a vertical wall.
• Staking the Loved One: At the climax of the Lendard arc, Shiki is tasked with killing Ziggy—freshly freed from the true Big Bad's control—so he can die as himself instead of live on to become a puppet again. After getting coaxed into action when Ziggy pretends to destroy Pino, Shiki musters the will to destroy his beloved grandfather with Black Sky.
• Stock Shōnen Hero: Much like his predecessors in Hiro Mashima's series, Shiki is a cheerful and kindhearted teenager with a wide-eyed look on life. He's excitable and is deeply invested in any friendships he makes, but his attempts to make friends are hampered by his poor social skills.
• Super Mode: During his fight with Elsie's doppelganger, Shiki unlocks a form of Overdrive—an Ether Gear's critical point—that lightens his hair color, forms Ether lines across his body, and gives him energy-based demon horns that float on the sides of his head. As he learns from Drakken, however, this is simply the last step away from Overdrive and not the real deal. His true Overdrive makes him look more like an actual, black-clad demon with pure white hair, purple eyes, blackened arms with a cracked pattern, and solid horns protruding from his head, and changes his clothes into a Badass Longcoat with no sleeves.
• Swiss-Army Superpower: His ability to manipulate gravity comes with a wide variety of applications. He can manipulate gravitational force to emulate Super-Strength, slide along the ground at high speeds, fly by falling sideways, Wall Run, create anti-gravity, and cause people's memories of their past or other timelines to "fall" into him or themselves.
• Take a Third Option: In Universe Zero, Mother presents two choices to Shiki: save her at the cost of himself and his friends, or let her die. Shiki seems to choose the latter, but he immediately reveals that he plans to save Mother too. He asks Rebecca to summon the Chronophage and have it revert Mother to her original form, the planet Earth, so he and his friends can save the Earth and its people before the fated natural disaster that ended the world.
• Telepathy: Shiki can use a variation of this by applying his gravity to other people's memories, causing them to "fall" into his mind.
• Temporal Theme Naming: Shiki's name is Japanese for "four seasons". This is in keeping with Mashima's personal tradition of naming main characters after seasons, following Haru (spring) from Rave Master, Natsu (summer) from Fairy Tail, Aki (autumn) from Monster Soul, and Mafuyu (winter) from the one-shot Fighting Force Mixture. Incidentally, Mashima's Monster Hunter adaptation, Monster Hunter Orage, also stars a protagonist named Shiki.
• Thinking Up Portals: After getting defeated, Ziggy passes Poseidon Nero's stolen "Wormhole" Ether Gear onto Shiki, giving him the ability to create portals and teleport anywhere at will. This power carries over to Universe Zero after Shiki regains his future memories, ironically using it against Nero himself.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Downplayed, as Shiki says that he'd rather not take another person's life without a reason, such as when he refuses to fight any civilians aboard the Belial Gore despite every one of them being tangled up in shady business. He is forced to make an exception in the Lendard arc when Ziggy is freed from the real Big Bad's control, destroying him to keep it from happening again.
• Took a Level in Cynic: He starts out as a Wide-Eyed Idealist who believes he can make friends with anybody if he just tries. From the moment after he sets foot off his planet and into the wider cosmos, his hopes are immediately and constantly dashed by the harsh reality that some people simply don't want to be friends with you, and/or aren't worth the effort. Thus, while he never stops his crusade for friendship, he learns to temper his expectations for who would make a good friend, only making exceptions when he feels they could use one in their life, no matter how horrible they are to him.
• Tragic Dream: When he was a kid, he convinced Ziggy to teach him Ether Gear so he could defeat him in a fair fight. That dream came to a crashing halt when Ziggy broke down from old age before he could finish teaching Shiki everything he knew. When Shiki finds out that Ziggy had a Tragic Dream of his own, however, Shiki realizes he has another way to "defeat" him and commits himself to fulfilling that dream. That changes after Ziggy comes back as the Big Bad, but by this point, Shiki shows no excitement in getting to fight his grandpa again, viewing his defeat as something just as important as finding Mother.
• Trauma Button: Though it's mostly Played for Laughs, Shiki breaks down in tears whenever anything reminds him of his old friends on Planet Granbell, whether it's remembering the way they betrayed him and chased him away, or wondering if they all turned back to normal. It becomes more tragic after Shiki returns home and discovers their inert bodies littering the park, demonstrated when they stumble across an identical situation on Red Cave, although in this case, Shiki remains more calm and introspective about it.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening:
  • Shiki does a complete Overdrive for the first time when he's held at gunpoint and is about to die a second time in World No.30, only for his gravity to pull in his memories from World No.29, making Shiki remember all the grief Drakken put his friends through, as well as his own vow to defeat Drakken.
  • In the Lendard arc, he awakens a higher level of Overdrive in extreme anger when Ziggy appears to destroy Pino in front of him after a period of freedom from the real Big Bad's control. Shiki quickly clues in that Ziggy was pretending to lose control this time and faked Pino's death, but nonetheless retains enough power to obliterate the nearly indestructible Ziggy.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: He has a lot of romantic tension with Rebecca, particularly after the Time Skip.
• Wall Run: One of his Ether Gear powers involves running across walls like they're horizontal floors.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: He's deathly afraid of bugs, which causes him to completely freeze up whenever he's anywhere near a huge number of them, or even the slightest touch or presence of a bug sends him into an uproar. To get around this, he and his friends try to get him to think of bugs as any other creature, such as octopi, cats, and birds.
• The World Is Just Awesome: Because he's so sheltered, Shiki jumps for joy whenever he learns something new, and is constantly in awe of all the things he encounters with Rebecca.
• Would Hit a Girl: He demonstrates on multiple occasions that he doesn't bat an eye at whatever gender his opponent has, such as agreeing to Homura's request for a duel, and battling two female Arc Villains (the fake Sister and Madame Kurenai).
• Wrong Genre Savvy: He seems to think the world works like it does in Fairy Tail, going by the lengths he goes to make friends and expects the Shooting Starlight guild to be like one big family, and he's sorely disappointed when all the people he meets either run away from him, mock him, or generally try not to pay him any attention. He's also under the impression that the adventures they go on are like an Eastern RPG, which he uses to justify stealing when he spontaneously decides to undergo a "class change".
• You Can't Go Home Again: The entire community of robots that raised Shiki on Granbell effectively dies once their power runs dry, made all the more tragic by how Shiki leaves home without realizing this. Mere moments after he returns home and finds out what happened, the entire planet gets reduced to rubble by the reactivated but evil Ziggy, thus sealing the deal. However, Shiki makes undoing this his goal when he decides that he'll wish for Mother to restore the planet.
• You're Not My Father: At the end of the Nero 66 arc, after Ziggy's attempt to wipe the crew out over Nero 66 opens Shiki's eyes to just how dangerous his grandfather is, Shiki stops addressing him as such and starts calling him by name, finally solidifying Ziggy's status as Shiki's enemy rather than family.

Tropes specific to different worlds (ALL SPOILERS UNMARKED)

World No.29

Shiki Granbell (Universe 1)

The version of Shiki that the story follows at the outset. Unlike in other worlds, his adventure comes to an end before he ever leaves the Sakura Cosmos, as he loses his life during an infiltration job on Drakken Joe's fortress gone horribly wrong.

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• Boom, Headshot!: How Drakken kills him, with no Gory Discretion Shot to spare the viewer the sight of it.
• Dead Alternate Counterpart: This version of Shiki meets his death at the hands of Drakken Joe in the Belial Gore arc. Where it initially seems Rebecca simply goes back time and prevents his death, she actually jumps into parallel timeline where Shiki hadn't died yet, with this Shiki's death being confirmed several times afterwards.
• Decoy Protagonist: A peculiar example. While Shiki is the overall protagonist, this specific version of him is Killed Off for Real before he makes much headway in his journey. His shoes are immediately filled by the Shiki from Universe 2, with Universe 3's Shiki branching off from him.
• "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner: Played with. After getting beaten with a gun pointed to his head by Drakken, Shiki vows to come back stronger and make himself Drakken's friend in a feeble act of defiance. However, he only does this after Drakken spells out his Thou Shalt Not Kill rule, so he doesn't expect it when Drakken makes an exception.
• Ghost Memory: His memories of getting killed by Drakken fall straight into Universe 2's Shiki a split second before meeting the same fate.
• It's All My Fault: He feels this way over the crew's disastrous loss against Drakken Joe, blaming himself for his friends' suffering after picking a fight his crew was hopelessly unprepared for. Regardless, his friends don't hold it against him, even when quivering under Drakken's mercy.
• Killed Off for Real: This Shiki gets capped by Drakken Joe in front of Rebecca and Homura, with his death being reiterated to clarify the different nature between each Universe.
• Our Hero Is Dead: Zig-Zagged. It looks like Shiki's death at Drakken's hands is undone when Rebecca leaps back in time and changes the outcome of the Belial Gore arc, but it's eventually revealed she merely jumped into a parallel timeline's past without actually changing anything in this one, meaning this Shiki was Killed Off for Real.
• A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: What gets this version of Shiki killed is his impatience and lack of planning with the Edens Zero when it came to confronting Drakken Joe. Shiki's orders to make the first attack only gives Drakken Joe the advantage to hack the Edens Zero, capture Rebecca, injure Weisz, eventually leading to Shiki's own demise.

World No.30

Shiki Granbell (Universe 2)

One of the most commonly found versions of Shiki in the Multiverse, who is doomed to fail in his mission to stop Ziggy from conquering the Aoi Cosmos, and instead triggers the time cycle that causes his own "death" and rebirth into something far worse...

For further information, see this page.

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• Accidental Time Travel: This happens to him and Universe 2's Rebecca when their powers resonate while Shiki tries compressing Shura's 20,000 antimatter bombs with gravity, distorting spacetime so much that the resulting blast sends them hurtling 20,000 years forward in time, one year for every bomb.
• Chekhov's Gunman: The Lendard arc reveals him to be the then-unidentified human male from the Norma arc's 20,000-year flash-forward nearly 200 chapters earlier.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Nero 66 would have been destroyed regardless of Shiki's actions, but his decision to try and save the planet also ensures the deaths of Rebecca and the rest of his crew, and sends him hurtling thousands of years into the future. This not only allows Ziggy's conquest of the Nero Empire to succeed, but also sets Shiki on the path to becoming Ziggy himself.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: As Ziggy mockingly tells Universe 3's Shiki, between trying to stop Shura's antimatter bombs and escaping with his friends, the former choice would've ensured the safety of his crew. In reality, everyone besides Shiki dies in that choice, which this Shiki makes, triggering a chain of events that sends him 20,000 years in the future to become Ziggy.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: Downplayed. Everything this Shiki goes through, from his darkening behavior to the entire Accidental Time Travel thing, appears to explain in retrospect how he would become Ziggy, the Big Bad. As it's later revealed, however, Ziggy was actually a victim of Grand Theft Me by the true Big Bad, the Edens One, and everything he knows about his past is second-hand information.
• Two Aliases, One Character: This version of Shiki is the past version of Ziggy, who suffers from Identity Amnesia.

World No.31

Shiki Granbell (Universe 3)

The only version of Shiki in the Multiverse to escape the wheel of time. By defying his fate with Xiaomei's help, he survives the Aoi War and matures into one of the most powerful heroes in the universe, committing three years of his life to hunting and stopping Ziggy. Unfortunately, because of numerous space travel violations and alliances with known criminals, the government has him branded as one of the Orácion Seis Galáctica.

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• Cyborg: Shiki becomes one after getting a robotic eye to replace the one he lost in the Aoi War, proudly declaring himself to be an O-Tech. According to Jinn, who's 60% machine, an artificial eye is a huge overstatement when it comes to what makes an O-Tech.
• Electronic Eyes: After Shiki gets his left eye ripped out by Shura, Sister replaces it with a mechanical eye that's physically identical to his real one. It's also equipped with X-Ray Vision that lets him see through people's clothing, to his female crewmates' dismay.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: In spite of all his efforts opposing Ziggy and saving planets from his control, his affiliation with Elsie Crimson and various other questionable acts—piloting an unregistered ship, recruiting followers of Drakken Joe, and inheriting Demon King Ziggy's power—leads the Interstellar Union Army to designate Shiki as one of the Oración Seis Galáctica, the top six most wanted outlaws in the cosmos.
• Magical Eye Streamers: When he goes into Overdrive after losing his eye, Shiki's prosthetic eyeball transforms into a fireball.

The Final World

Shiki Granbell (Universe Zero)

In the redone history of Universe Zero, Shiki's life is mostly unchanged, except that he lives without ever needing to worry about the Granbell robots shutting down for another thousand years.

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• Always with You: Shiki uses this sentiment as inspiration to model his Overdrive Route: Ziggy after his adoptive grandfather and Alternate Self, allowing Ziggy to live on through himself despite his death.
• Cool Mask: When he enters Overdrive Route: Ziggy, Shiki gains a skull mask identical to his grandfather's more detailed skull face.
• Insane Troll Logic: Part of his reason for trying to befriend Universe Zero's Drakken Joe is because they both defeated each other in two entirely separate timelines, thereby making them even despite this technically being their first meeting in this world. Drakken, even if he believed Shiki's claims, is baffled by the train of thought that led him to that conclusion.
• Next Tier Powerup: During his battle with Poseidon Nero, he gains a new form of Overdrive called Overdrive Route: Ziggy, which reconfigures his body into a shape that will be able to handle the full extent of his power. This form greatly resembles the aforementioned Ziggy, including black armor, large horns, and a skull-like face.
• Power Makes Your Hair Grow: His Overdrive Route: Ziggy form gives him the Barbarian Longhair he used to have, which helps sell the image that Shiki and Ziggy have combined into one.
• Shoulders of Doom: He gains giant pauldrons similar to the original Ziggy when in his Overdrive Route: Ziggy form.
• Swapped Roles: Shiki's first meeting with Shura in Universe Zero plays out as it did in Universe 2, but with Shiki stopping Shura's ship with gravity to draw him out and become his friend, rather than the other way around.
• Tears of Joy: He, Rebecca, and Happy share this reaction at the start of the Reunion arc: first when they regain their memories of each other when they meet for the first time, and again when they reunite with a living version of Witch aboard the Edens Zero.
• Took a Level in Idealism: Shiki always started out as a Wide-Eyed Idealist who believed he could befriend anybody, but Took a Level in Cynic after getting betrayed by Ziggy and challenged by truly irredeemable villains like Drakken and Shura. After his Universe Zero self gains his future memories, however, his new life experiences have rekindled his old optimism, and the discovery that many of his enemies have changed for the better—including Drakken and Shura—restores his motivation to make friends and allies out of them.
• Weak, but Skilled: Shiki becomes this in Universe Zero after regaining his memories from the previous world. Thus, while he remembers all the skills and abilities he'd learned, his untrained physical body keeps him from tapping into the full strength necessary to use it. He overcomes this after Nero helps him reconfigure himself into a new form of Overdrive that can use that power, allowing his body to adapt.