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Considering that the very existence of All For One is a massive spoiler, and how connected he is to almost every other villain in the story as well as the Quirks he has handled, all spoilers on this page are unmarked!


??? Shigaraki — All For One

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/all_for_one_ones_justice_2_render.png
The Symbol of Evil
Click here to see him unmasked. 
Click here to see his new mask. 
Click here to see his original face. 
Click here to see him as a young man. 

Voiced by: Akio Ōtsuka (Japanese), John Swasey (English), Carlos Segundo (Latin American Spanish)

Debut: Chapter 59 (Manga), Episode 33 (Anime)

Playable in: My Hero One's Justice, My Hero One's Justice 2, My Hero Academia: Ultra Impact

Quirk: All For One (Artificial Duplicate), All For One (Original; Formerly)

Stolen Quirks: Currently: Air Cannon, Warping, Springlike Limbs, Kinetic Booster (x4), Strength Enhancer (x3), Impact Recoil, Rivets, Spearlike Bones, Hypertrophy, Proliferation, Forcible Quirk Activation, Rivet Stab, Infrared Ray, Life Force (Original), Unnamed Telekinetic/Gravity Quirk(s), Unnamed Mind Control Quirk, Radio Wave, Search, Unnamed Lie Detection Quirk, Unnamed Levitation Quirk, Unnamed Crescent Blade Quirk, Unnamed Black Ooze Quirk, Hardflame Fan, Unnamed Mouth Quirk Unnamed Vibration Detection Quirk, Unnamed Glue Quirk, Unnamed Shield Quirk, Unnamed Spatial Distortion Quirk, Unnamed Body Appendages Quirk, Unnamed Black Lightning Quirk, Unnamed Nuclear Explosion Quirk, Impure Beam, Fierce Wings, Dark Ball, Bloodlet, Antigen Swap, Bloodcurdle. Formerly: Stockpiling, Super Regeneration, Enhanced Strength, Overclock, First Generation Spike Quirk, Air Walk, Navel Laser, Body Bulk, Scale Mail. Unknown Status: Unnamed Lightning Quirk(s), Unnamed Landscape Manipulation Quirks, Unnamed Fire Quirk(s), Unnamed Monster Jaw Quirk, Miscellaneous First Generation Quirks (x4).

Rank: S

"Friends, if you wish to leave, all you need do is follow me. Yes, I want you to stand by my side. In the era of chaos on the horizon, a more perfect demon lord will be born. You will bear witness to the story of how I became the greatest demon lord this world has known!"

The founder and mastermind of the League of Villains, he is an infamous villain believed to be an urban legend. Initially only heard through a computer monitor, he is eventually forced to reveal himself to save the rest of the League from capture, at the cost of his own imprisonment.

All For One has been around since Quirks first emerged. Since that time, he has used his power to amass numerous devout followers, with whom he ruled the Japanese underworld from the shadows for years. He had a younger brother named Yoichi Shigaraki, who opposed him and became the first wielder of One For All. Five years prior to the events of the main story, All Might put a stop to his reign of evil by defeating his minions and eventually the man himself in a battle that left both parties severely injured. Since then, All For One wants to bequeath his place to his protégé, Tomura Shigaraki.

In the aftermath of Paranormal Liberation War, he uses his Quirk vestige to possess Shigaraki which leads to freeing his original body from Tartarus. He then sets out with his protégé to wage war on Izuku Midoriya, marking him as his new nemesis after All Might passed on One For All so he can finally steal it for himself. By the series' final arc, it's revealed All For One intends for One For All to boost his own abilities so he may Take Over the World by making him and his Quirks the only way to provide sustainable resources, forcing everybody to rely on him as a God-Emperor.

All For One boasts of a staggering power in a class of its own due to his titular Quirk, "All For One". With it, he can steal other Quirks for personal use or transfer them to others. He inadvertently created One For All this way.


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  • 0% Approval Rating: Let's be clear: barely anybody actually LIKES All For One. The only ones shown wholeheartedly supporting him are demonstrated to be mentally unbalanced in their own ways, and their support comes across more as him manipulating their attachment to him. His rampant narcissism and determination to ruin the life of almost anybody he comes into contact with show he's a cartoonishly evil and insipid man obsessed with enacting his Maou the Demon King fantasies without a thought for anybody it might hurt — in fact, he delights in spending time creatively finding means to make as many people as possible suffer, just for the sake of hurting them, and reacts with ecstatic glee at any bare-faced animosity expressed towards him. What's more, his overarching goal isn't so much to be the World's Strongest Man as it is to be so utterly reviled he is recognized as the ultimate villain. Ironically, of all characters, it's Shigaraki who doesn't let him get away with it. It's telling that by the Final Battle, Garaki is the only minion he has that genuinely remains loyal to him.
  • Ability Mixing: His most devastating attacks come from the combination of several Quirks that complement one another. For example, mixing his Air Cannon with Kinetic Boosters, Strength Enhancers, and Springlike Limbs to make what would've been a contained burst of air into a shockwave that topples buildings. Additionally, his Quirk also possessed the unique function to create entirely different Quirks and effects from mixing two separate Quirks together, which is the genesis of how One For All was accidentally created by him.
  • Above Good and Evil: All For One doesn't believe in morality, believing that people are free to do as they please if they have the power to do so. It's a belief that he tries to teach Tomura as well. This is ultimately subverted: All For One's true motivation is to be the most reviled, invincible Demon King the world has ever known. He knows he's the villain, because he wanted to be. This implies that he was simply fostering Tomura's loathing of the status quo and society as a whole rather than something he actually genuinely believes.
    All For One: (to a young Tomura Shigaraki) Conscience, integrity, morals, ethics... all mere fabrications invented by others. People who wanted to run the world smoothly as they saw fit.
  • Abusive Parents: Zigzagged and then ultimately played straight. He does appear supportive towards his adopted son at first, but the ensuing reveal that he intends to merge with Tomura into one being against his will shows he never actually cared about him at all. He just saw him as an extension of himself, making him the ultimate narcissistic parent. Tomura also mentions over and over how nobody saved him when he needed it even though All For One supposedly had saved him, implying he's known all along that his master had condemned him to a life of suffering, and deeply hates him for it. This is confirmed once Tomura calls him out on grooming him for his own purposes, destroying the vestige controlling him and rejecting his adoptive father once and for all.
  • Achilles' Heel: Powerful as he may be, All For One has a few prominent handicaps that undermine his self-belief in himself as an invincible "Demon Lord", much to his dissatisfaction.
    • The injuries All Might inflicted upon him during their prior clash never healed properly, as he lacked Hyper Regeneration at the time, and continue to limit his effectiveness in battle in several ways. He is forced to constantly be connected to life-support equipment, which he attempts to disguise by repurposing it into a Cool Mask to intimidate opponents with, but Hawks points out that the fact he took said equipment with him when escaping Tartarus is a sign that he ultimately needs it regardless, and thus targeting it becomes the focus for the heroes confronting him without One For All's strength to overwhelm him. When it eventually does break, All For One's body quickly shuts down and fails to respond properly, leaving to him getting fatally torched by Endevour's Prominence Burn move. Furthermore, the injuries on his disfigured 'vessel' of a body limit the total power he could actually unleash against the heroes, as the strain of the powerful Quirks in combination together was more than he could physically withstand, and the loss of his natural senses leave him open to eating a massive blow from Tokoyami when he's briefly unable to use the sensory Quirks he was compensating with.
    • His inability to understand positive emotions repeatedly screws him over in several ways but becomes a fatal weakness for the Vestige of himself merged into Tomura's psyche. Being able to understand and assimilate only the negative part of Tomura's personality left him blind to the fact Tomura had retained his individuality thanks to the positive emotions and memories he still possessed. This allows his protege to steadily start regaining control of his mind and body from within as the heroes start damaging the physical body All For One is controlling, leaving him panicked that the merging is coming undone and he has no means of preventing this mid-fight. The utter thrashing Izuku unleashes on Tomura's body is bad enough that Tomura seizes full control and obliterates the vestige one-sidedly.
  • Adapted Out: Not him, but the holes in his palms that let him give and take Quirks are absent during his appearance in season 3. Entirely averted later in season 5 where they're added following the manga drawing attention to this being an important detail to having the All For One Quirk.
  • The Ageless: He's older than One For All, which has been passed down through nine heroes, yet has not aged since. All Might speculates that he found a Quirk that stops aging, later confirmed to be Dr. Garaki's Quirk, "Life Force". It's implied that he's not truly ageless, but his natural ageing process has been slowed down so noticeably that he'll be alive and in good health for a very long time — and his overarching plan throughout the series is ultimately to create the 'next him' in the younger Tomura's body with said Quirk copied into it, meaning All For One would outlive his original self's natural death and have an extended lifespan on top of that. This is part of the reason his Hour of Power with Eri's Rewind is able to last so long — despite the energy rewinding him at a speed so fast that the wounds All Might inflicted on him years ago vanish in seconds, he's so old that his lifespan has enough years on the clock that he's confident of freeing his 'Next me' before his inevitable Cessation of Existence.
  • All According to Plan: For most of the story, this is played straight. All For One has an overarching goal he is manipulating both the League of Villains, and especially Tomura, and the heroes towards achieving, but is intentionally vague about what said goal is so nobody can preempt his machinations. Even defeating him and locking him in Tartarus doesn't stop his plans, because he'd set them up to be self-sustaining long before he ever stepped up to fight All Might. He later gloats to Dabi that he'd made full use of his extended lifespan to set up as many long-term contingencies and fallbacks as he could think of years in advance, so no matter what the outcome, he'd always have a fallback plan even in the worst-case scenario. However, the heroes are eventually able to turn the tables on him in the final battle, in part by letting All For One think this trope is still at play.
  • All Your Powers Combined: His Quirk combines this with Power Parasite and Super-Empowering. He's able to steal others' Quirks for himself, allowing him to combine several Quirks together. He can also stack multiples of the same Quirk to amplify their power.
  • Ambition Is Evil: Even as a kid he loved to emulate a demon king from a manga and came to revel in the power to rule the world. He was there at the beginning of the Quirk crisis where Heroes, Vigilantes, and Villains arose, rising to power in the ensuing chaos. It can be argued that his ambition is the exact same as it was ever since he was a child — to become an invincible demon lord and successfully enact whatever plans and schemes he has to in order to ensure a future where The Bad Guy Wins, and all that changed in the meantime was the variety of Quirks he could steal, export and monopolise towards that childish dream at the expense of countless people.
  • An Offer You Can't Refuse: Anyone he offers a service to will quickly learn that he expects to gain far more than he ever gives. Answering "no" isn't an option: once the "offer" is given, he already has his hooks too deep into the targets for them to ever be free from him again. They'll be forced to serve All For One for the rest of their lives, either as a minion, a resource, a tool, or an example.
  • Anarcho-Tyranny: His idea of Dystopia, where the whole world is in chaos and nations have to depend on him for resources to sustain some semblance of order.
  • Antagonist Abilities: The Quirk "All For One" is exceedingly powerful and could be considered the ultimate nightmare in a society that revolves around Quirks. With the story's emphasis on putting one's better qualities in service of society, it's only appropriate that the Greater-Scope Villain's power would be to steal the "talents" of others for himself. The ability also acts as a Foil to "One For All", which enables the cultivation of a collective legacy throughout multiple generations.
  • Arch-Enemy: It's difficult to find a major character he hasn't royally pissed off to the point they're personally invested in ending him. In fact, since his ultimate goal to to become the most universally reviled and loathed figure possible, it can be said that he intends to become the archenemy to the entire world.
    • He sees every inheritor of One For All as worthless and always tries to break their spirits so he can finally acquire the Quirk they hold. Of them, there are four he has particularly earned the ire of:
      • Of all the users of One For All, he seems to genuinely hate the Second User. When fighting Bakugo, the vestige of All For One starts getting reminded of the Second, making him uncharacteristically angry. His Tranquil Fury towards the Second is shown with streams of tears pouring down his face. It's hinted that this is due to Yoichi having passed away after successfully passing on One For All to the Second.
      • It was because of him that Nana Shimura had to give up her young son for adoption to protect him from the clutches of an evil cult. All For One would later track down her grandson Tenko and groom him into becoming Tomura Shigaraki, even giving him one of Nana's hands for his villain costume in a final defilement of her legacy.
      • All Might, as the murderer of his mentor Nana Shimura, and the one who dealt him a crippling blow. He reciprocates the feeling towards All Might, despising him for destroying his criminal empire, and makes his loathing clear during their interactions. Exploited by All Might in the Final Battle, as he banks on All For One's pre-existing hatred of him combined with his ongoing Villainous Breakdown, Shigaraki's influence on his psyche, and Rewind making him too unstable to be capable of ignoring him if he sees him, and they engage in a final brawl as he puts on Powered Armor.
        All Might: You must remember the endless warring that got us here... And now I hear that Tomura Shigaraki's hatred is even affecting your original body. So I'm thinking you won't be able to ignore me. Isn't that right? [suits up in Powered Armor] I AM HERE.
      • Izuku after the Kamino incident. He becomes fixated on him as his new enemy after All Might's retirement and tortures the boy mercilessly, almost like a child who's found a new toy. And the feeling is mutual on Izuku's end as he loathes and detests him with every fiber of his being. Him being the final One For All user also magnifies All For One's obsession with the Quirk, as he grows increasingly determined to destroy the young man at any cost necessary.
        All For One: The path you've chosen to walk is a thorny one. Every battle grinds away at your soul with no end in sight. Can you guess who was on my mind the entire time I was in prison? You. All Might no longer interests me. I've moved on from that great useless oaf. Now it's your turn!
    • He has slowly but gradually become this to all of Class 1-A over the course of the series. In between attacking them at the USJ and the Training Camp, targeting both Midoriya and Bakugo at different points, and finally, his exploitation of Aoyama, he is officially at the top of their shit list.
  • Archnemesis Dad: To Shigaraki, having raised the boy as his adoptive father with the express purpose of absorbing his consciousness into himself to ascend as a "more perfect Demon Lord." In the Final Act of the story he becomes as much of a threat to Shigaraki's goal of becoming the greatest villain as he is to the heroes, although he keeps trying to play it off as genuine respect. He only sees Shigaraki as an extension of himself, explaining why he was able to care about him at all. It was always in service to his own prosperity and to Shigaraki's detriment. It boils to a head in Chapter 379 where Shigaraki manages to fully retake control of his body and destroys the vestige of All For One within him, making it clear he has no desire to steal One For All or be All For One's pawn.
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: All For One's century-long reign of terror has seen the initiation of several cold wars between heroes and villains, torn families apart, has him commit numerous counts of first-degree murder, engage in horrific human experimentation, groom a young child into becoming his meat suit, and his ultimate plan hinges on torturing a sixteen-year-old boy so he may finally possess his Quirk... but his idea of "darkness" is also dismal and muddy according to Tokoyami.
  • Ascended Fanboy: Played horrifically straight which makes him a dark mirror to Izuku. Rather than be a fan of the superheroes in the comics he grew up reading, he became a fan of the Demon King, seeing many similarities between himself and the character. With his Quirk, he became able to enact his Demon Lord fantasies in real life and stops at nothing to ensure he can play the role for eternity. His dialogue during his conflict with the heroes even implies that he sincerely believes he can't be challenged or beaten by anybody other than a holder of One For All, both because of his own immense might and because of the 'roles' each are playing.
  • Attack Reflector: One of his Quirks, "Impact Recoil", lets him reverse the impact of someone's attack. By combining it with his "Warping" Quirk, which lets him teleport people to his location, he can create impromptu Human Shields as Gran Torino learned the hard way. However, it only works on physical attacks, meaning attacks that uses properties like extreme heat cannot be reflected, such as a massive flaming punch.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • Mass Quirk combinations like his 'ultimate combination of Quirks' fall into this: he has to activate the individual Quirks and spend time actually letting the changes to his body take effect. Against All Might this wasn't an issue because All Might couldn't really counterattack and no one was able to interrupt, but he's notably never shown using that complex of Quirk combinations otherwise, normally settling for one or two at a time.
    • He finally manages to unlock the full strength of his stolen Quirks through channeling his hatred and refusal to lose into them, something he can only achieve through his deepening mental link with Tomura. This allows him to unleash cataclysmic blasts of power far quicker than he could with his mass Quirk combinations before. However, his body cannot withstand the strain of such power, and every time he does so it utterly disintegrates one of his arms. Thanks to Rewind he can use this as a repeat tactic, but every time he does so it temporarily handicaps himself, and regrowing his limbs burns up more Rewind energy than necessary, further limiting the time he has remaining. Furthermore, due to the self-same mental link and All For One's unfamiliarity with handing such strong emotions, he no longer thinks his actions through carefully, resulting in him continuing to make sloppy errors in judgement that get worse the more the heroes exploit his ego.
  • Ax-Crazy: He was always this to an extent, as indicated by the lengths he'd go to to sadistically torment others and his desire to stoke universal animosity towards himself, but had enough self-control to be able to channel this into fulfilling his roleplaying of a real-life Demon Lord from his favourite comic books. However, by the final battle, his ongoing Humiliation Conga pushes him deep into the throes of a Villainous Breakdown, combining with Rewind regressing his mentality the closer he gets to his Hour of Power running out to erode that self-control and showcasing his mania in full, sporting wide-eyed grins that highlight how much he's lost it. Despite logically knowing that All Might is intentionally baiting him into delaying his precious time and having practically no benefit to halting his rush towards Tomura, his desire to kill him is so overpowering that he can't resist, his mind becoming ruled by his violent impulses, coming off as an unhinged madman obsessed with sating his desire for carnage, not unlike Muscular.
  • Back from the Dead: At the exact moment of death by being nearly vaporized by Endeavor's flames no less, as he activates his artificial copy of Eri's Rewind reverse-engineered from Overhaul's bullets despite ensuring Cessation of Existence just to make the fight even harder as he heals to his prime, making all their efforts for naught to screw with them one last time.
  • Bad Boss:
    • All For One seems to be genuinely lenient, patient, and encouraging as leader of the League, willing to give them as many chances to succeed. However, this "compassion" is but a false front: ultimately, he sees people as mere means to an end, and will abandon them as he sees fit, without remorse. During the Paranormal Liberation War arc, he hijacks Tomura's body and flees the battlefield, deserting most of the League of Villains members, including Gigantomachia. He frames this as Tomura's punishment for losing the battle against Deku and Endeavor. Otherwise, he averts this trope through Pragmatic Villainy.
    • Abandoning Machia in particular would come back to bite him in the Final Battle, as Machia's Super-Senses meant he knew it was All For One inside of Tomura, and thus very much aware that his master had abandoned him. As such, when Machia is freed, rather than rejoining All For One, he turns on him.
  • Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: All For One "hired" Lady Nagant to capture Deku, but she is defeated by him. Deku tries to sway her to his side but All For One abruptly detonates her for failing her task. Played With, however, in that he never actually intended Nagant to win against Deku, having concealed vital information from her about his Combo Platter Powers that allowed Izuku to seize the advantage against her, and was always intending on killing her right before Izuku's eyes to break him, aware he would be compelled to try and help her and using that to mock his efforts.
  • Bad Powers, Bad People: The ability to steal powers from people and forcefully implant them into others is about as villainous as it sounds.
  • Bad Samaritan: He made it a habit to take in desperate children harmed or rejected by society and provide guidance for them. Not because he cares for any of them, but because he was on the lookout for children with powerful Quirks and enough trauma that he could mold them into potential host bodies to replace his damaged original one. Those who were unsuitable for that were put to use as either minions or materials for his Nomu experiments. In some cases, it's implied that he was at least partially responsible for some of the circumstances that lead the kids into his clutches in the first place. It turns out his entire endgame is to set up a situation where everything is so horrible, he can swoop in to 'help' with his Quirks, all so he can force the world to bow down to him as their demon king.
  • Badass in a Nice Suit: He is always seen wearing a suit, like Lex Luthor or many of Batman's villains.
  • Badass Longcoat: Chapter 193 reveals that he used to wear one, back in his prime.
  • Bald of Evil: Everything from his mouth upwards is nothing but mangled scar tissue, including his scalp. Granted, he used to have hair before his first clash with All Might and gets to have it back temporarily when using Rewind as a Suicide Attack against Endeavor's group.
  • Battle in the Center of the Mind: On two fronts, his plan relies on both subjugating Tomura's personality to absorb into his own, and then use their combined wills to override the will of One For All. This ends up backfiring spectacularly as the punishment he suffers in Tomura's body from the heroes stacks and stacks with Erasure deactivating his Quirks, leading to the "fissure" resulting in Tomura's original aspect as Tenko to fight back against his adoptive father. When Izuku catches a glimpse of All For One's inner vestige world, he sees him stumbling around in a pool of metaphysical miasma, on the cusp of being overwhelmed and just barely keeping himself and Tomura merged. And in the end, he fails as Shigaraki regains control.
  • Be Careful What You Wish For: His ultimate goal is to be Hated by All, as he sees that as the mark of a truly great villain. By the end, he finds out the hard way that includes his own allies when Gigantomachia is beating him into the ground over being abandoned by him. At this point, Garaki is the only minion he has left that's still loyal to him.
    Hawks: Looks to me like nobody's on board with your grand tale, buddy.
  • Believing Their Own Lies: The longer the Final Battle drags on, the more evident it becomes that All For One has largely been deceiving himself on the veracity of his plan to assimilate Shigaraki's personality and become an immortal Demon Lord. Even after the heroes have bested him numerous times and Shigaraki has (albeit without his knowledge) destroyed his vestige, he still cannot concede defeat because he's too far in to quit, and as a coping mechanism continues talking down to them, saying they're helpless without All Might even though their cooperation has been foiling every last one of his schemes.
  • Beneath the Mask: Throughout the series, All For One has had the air of a dignified Evil Overlord who plans for everything and is always in control. However, the final arcs show that beneath that, he's every bit as childish and bratty as Shigaraki is as that mask slips. Best shown early on when he's externally keeping the mask up, but his inner monologue shows him becoming increasingly frustrated until his composure slips, and he begins showing it overtly.
  • Berserk Button:
    • There are two things shown in the series actually capable of making All For One not just angry, but furious: not being in control and having his self-image as the invincible Demon King undermined. While these would make anyone angry, All For One's nature makes them this trope for him specifically: as a psychopath, his shallow emotions mean genuinely angering him is borderline impossible on a pathological level. This means not only do these things make him truly angry, but they're also seemingly the only two things in the world that can. All his outward displays of furious rage can be linked back to these in some way or another, for example: He shed Berserker Tears and displayed uncharacteristic icy fury towards the Second holder of One For All, which persists even generations later, because his actions prevented him from forcing Yoichi to join him and demonstrated that all his accumulated power could not stop his 'possessions'' from being taken from him.
    • People pointing out that villains are inevitably destined to lose is a more downplayed one, that combines the above two points together. He grabbed Yoichi by the face to force the power-stockpiling quirk onto him when he refuted his dreams of The Bad Guy Wins with this and his ongoing Villainous Breakdown through the Final Battle is tied to the fact that no matter how much effort or planning he put into averting this outcome, he's somehow still losing in the end. Hawks becomes fully aware this is an easy way to get under All For One's skin, and while trying to stop him from falling back to save Shigaraki, he invokes this by reminding All For One that Endeavor already beat him and hitting his 'self-image threatened' button. This successfully causes All For One to go from smug and mocking to a hateful Death Glare.
    • Though he keeps a stoic facade on, it's shown that All For One cannot stand people who keep a positive outlook on the future, and believe in outcomes where the heroes triumph, feeding into both the above points. To his warped perspective, this disrespects the "Demon Lord's" position as a figure of absolute dread and misery that humbles and terrifies all around him, and continued rejection of this outcome only makes him redouble his efforts to demoralise and break his enemies' will, with his inner monologue showcasing him getting continually more frustrated by their persistence. His Vestige, upon suffering an actual loss against Star and Stripe because of this, snaps into a Villainous Breakdown, ranting at her as the 'Spectre of All Might'.
      All For One: I can't stand that look in their eyes. Looking past me, having lost none of that light... well, no, the light has gone out. Yet they stoke the flames, like heaping kindling onto the fire.
  • Berserker Tears: Surprisingly enough, yes. A flashback to him killing the Second user of One For All has him coldly glaring at him whilst giving him a Neck Lift with tears streaming down his face, his demeanour ice-cold and the complete opposite of his usual enjoyment of killing his enemies as painfully as possible. It's hinted this is because of Yoichi having passed away after Passing the Torch to the Second, and All For One getting unusually enraged by the loss of his only family, or at least a valuable possession.
  • Beyond Redemption: Even Izuku, the resident All-Loving Hero who's trying to save Shigaraki of all people from him, considers no other option than killing All For One to ultimately save the day. The story takes every chance to frame him as a soulless psychopath, an image he wholeheartedly embraces with glee, with even the League of Villains ending up his victims in ways that elicit sympathy. From manipulating and grooming Shigaraki, to reviving Toya and triggering his descent into becoming Dabi, to using Spinner as a backup plan during the Final Battle, and more, All For One proves himself entirely undeserving of pity, and the world will be better off once he's gone.
  • BFG: During his battle with Team Endeavor, All For One combines his various Quirks together to create a large, grotesque organic cannon and fire off a supercharged Air Cannon. It's only thanks to a timely save by Hawks are Jirou and Tokoyami able to dodge it, though it ends up costing Jirou her ear and half her Quirk.
  • Big Bad: He is the central antagonist of the series and the founder of the League of Villains until All Might beats him and he is incarcerated. Even with him imprisoned, the story still frames him as the ultimate evil, and his presence is felt throughout. It becomes Played With later on, as upon freeing his original body from Tartarus, he takes back control over the remnants of the League in full and focuses his efforts on destroying Midoriya and completing his centuries-long plan of stealing One for All, aided by the fact that Shigaraki's consciousness is getting subjugated by the Split-Personality Merge with his vestige. This becomes entirely flipped towards the end as he turns into a Big Bad Wannabe instead once Shigaraki destroys his vestige.
  • Big Bad Duumvirate: With Shigaraki. All For One monitors him from the shadows, while Shigaraki leads the League of Villains publicly. Their dynamic changes throughout the story, however.
  • Big Bad Ensemble: By the time of the Paranormal Liberation War arc, once Shigaraki gains the original All For One Quirk, master and apprentice start fighting for control over their shared body. By the time he has Tomura's body retreat from battle, he has wrestled enough control that Deku sees Tomura as someone to rescue despite being archenemies.
  • Big Bad Wannabe: Deconstructed, but ultimately played straight. All For One remains the true Big Bad for much of the story, but that's precisely why he begins sliding into this territory instead: he remains Big Bad for too long, well past the point he's able to keep up with the heroes. The central theme of the series is about succession, one generation to the next. All For One can't accept that, eventually, he will be surpassed and so tries to hog the position from Tomura when he's well past his prime to relive his glory days as the Symbol of Evil. Once Shigaraki has the opportunity, he takes back control of his body and affirms he has no desire to steal One For All, putting All For One firmly in this position for the story's climax.
  • Big Brother Bully: He seemed to be his younger brother's primary caretaker. He also locked him in a safe, kept him from interfering with his plans, and ultimately forced a Quirk upon him. He did claim this to be a compromise, and may have had good intentions, though any details are ultimately obscure.
  • Bishōnen Line: Thanks to being pushed past his limits by Endeavor's team, All For One is forced to use Rewind in order to briefly return to prime strength and make his way to Shigaraki. This gradually undoes all of his injuries, but only because he's getting younger. The more damage inflicted upon him; the faster Rewind is forced to go. He goes from his current, mutilated state to a middle-aged, yet handsome and well-built, man. He later de-ages to his mid-to-late 20s, looking very similar to Tomura and Dabi. This is only viable because of how long he's lived; otherwise, it's implied he wouldn't have more than a few meager minutes at best.
  • Blatant Lies:
    • Whilst normally he prefers to distort the facts in his favor or will happily gloat to his enemies' faces about any Awful Truth that will hurt them, when he's pushed into a corner, he will resort to this to keep as much of an advantage as he can. When the heroes successfully wear him down physically and mentally during the Final Battle, when Izuku arrives to confront him and demands to know if any part of Tomura's mentality is remaining after their Split-Personality Merge, he claims that there isn't and that only All For One's consciousness remains thanks to his extended years alive in comparison, just to demoralize Izuku and deny him any hope of an 'ideal ending'. Both the imagery and Miro's recounting of TomurAFO's Out-of-Character Alert make it clear that All For One and 'Tenko Shimura' are still Fighting from the Inside with each other, and All For One gets irked at his deception failing instantly.
    • As his mentality further regresses thanks to Rewind, his refusal to accept the reality of his loss and impending demise from the same power pushes him into this more and more, coming off as a childish denial of the truth as he persists in trying to enforce his "victory". He denies that All Might's ploy to bait him into wasting his remaining time with a pointless fight is working whilst he's still fighting him.
    All For One: No, obviously I didn't fall for your cheap ploy to stall me. I can easily spare the time to clean up the trash by the roadside!!
    All Might: Desperate to play it cool, huh? How undignified!!
  • Blind Seer: He's been blind since his fight with All Might and uses an "Infrared Ray" Quirk to sense his surroundings. The prison he's kept in has so many sensors that it impairs his ability to "see". This ceases to be the case after he activates a variant of 'Rewind' he managed to get from the Destroying bullets Tomura successfully salvaged from the hospital, with his right eye regenerating as part of the Wham Shot of his survival despite lacking a direct Healing Factor like Tomura or the Nomus at that point.
  • Blood from Every Orifice: He escapes the effects of Stain's Bloodcurdle this way, using "bloodlet" to forcibly expel all his viscera out of himself, with a lovely shot of the fluids bursting from his eyes and ears before he's entirely obscured by his own body mass of blood.
  • Blow You Away: One of his Quirks, "Air Cannon", fires a blast of air from his hands. He can combine this with a "Spring-like Limbs" Quirk, four "Kinetic Boosters", and three "Strength Enhancers" to increase its destructive power. It takes out several pro heroes in seconds.
  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: Played With. He claims that the actions of beings like himself are Above Good and Evil, when convincing young Tenko to embrace the path of villainy, but it's implied to be another manipulation tactic to break the young boy's fragile mentality to serve his purpose rather than something he actually believes. He actually has a very clear understanding of right and wrong, mainly from his avid love of reading comic books in his youth. But what warps it around to this is that All For One deliberately sets out to commit 'evil' actions not because he believes they're for the greater good or a twisted sense of morality, but simply because they're considered to be evil. As he explains to Hawks, he considers villains to be those who are feared and hated equally by all who know them, and as he's intending to become a real-life 'Demon Lord', his grand ambition is to become the most universally hated person the world over, as a sign of his status as the ultimate villain. What matters to All For One isn't whether his actions actually are truly evil or good, it's whether they stoke the ire of those around him, on a grander scale, the better.
  • Body Backup Drive: His ultimate purpose for Tomura. Over the decades, All For One's own body had experienced difficulties storing new Quirks, as these evolved at a fast rate. When Dr. Garaki performs a body enhancement surgery on Tomura and transplants the original "All For One" Quirk onto the young villain, a vestige of All For One's consciousness, which can override Tomura's will, is carried with it. To this end, All For One starts treating his original, crippled body like a disposable pawn, willing to undertake risky moves with it that he would never do himself otherwise because he fully plans to live on through his 'Next Me', performing faux Heroic Sacrifices with it to further his plans, such as staying behind to fight All Might to enable Tomura and the League to flee the scene despite the risk of him losing and being executed for his crimes, or using a variant of Eri's dangerous and untested 'Rewind' Quirk he salvaged from the Destroying Bullets in order to 'try it out' on a body that he held no particular attachment and was already doomed anyway.
  • Body Horror: With the exception of his mouth and chin, his head is a mass of scar tissue, with no eyes, nose, or ears; judging by the scars on the back of his neck, there are likely many more hidden within his suit. During the final battle, Endeavor manages to burn him alive with a point blank Prominence Burn, reducing him to a charred corpse only for All For One to use Eri's Rewind Quirk to rejuvenate himself, his eye being the first thing to regenerate, resulting in one hell of a Nightmare Face. When Shigaraki manages to retake his body from All For One's control, it results in numerous hands erupting from the All For One vestige.
  • Borrowed Catchphrase: He uses All Might's "I am here" as a means to either sway others to join his cause, or to let the heroes know that things will be going south for them. He also inverts All Might's last words as a hero ("Now it's your turn!") to let Izuku know he now has a target on his back
  • Break the Haughty:
    • The entire Final Battle consists of All For One's self-image of an invincible demon king being torn to shreds as the heroes completely upend his plan and he begins to be beaten by 'Jobber Characters.' All For One doesn't take this well.
    • All Might specifically invokes this against him, during their third fight. All For One is on a Race Against the Clock and has no logical reason or benefit to delaying himself to kill a Quirkless All Might and risk vanishing before he can reach Tomura. All Might instead banks on his pre-existing hatred of him and his unstable mentality from his reverted age to override his rationality and compel him to kill him at all costs in order to sooth his bruised ego for the humiliations he's suffered. To that end, he strategically mocks All For One as he skilfully combats him with support items, literally kicking the crap out of him whilst laughing in his face over the absurdity of his dream to become an "invincible Demon Lord" when he's too inefficient and pathetic to kill a Quickless man like him despite reaching godlike levels of power with his Quirks. It works like a charm, despite All For One's retorts to the contrary.
  • Break Them by Talking: The sheer ease with which he's able to get under someone's skin is practically a Quirk in its own right.
    • When facing off against All Might, he drops a bombshell by revealing Tomura Shigaraki's true identity: Tenko Shimura, the grandson of All Might's mentor, Nana Shimura. All Might is so stunned by the revelation that he briefly loses the will to fight. It takes the help of Endeavor and other Pro Heroes for him to get back into the fight. Later, when All Might visits All For One in Tartarus, All For One wastes no time trying to antagonize him by making an educated guess about the current state of society and mocking All Might's powerlessness.
    • When facing off against Endeavor in the final battle, he wastes no time trying to get under his skin, bringing up his abuse of his children and accusing him of shirking responsibility by pitting Shoto against Dabi. Hawks desperately warns Endeavor to not fall for his mind games and Endeavor is able to ignore his taunting for the most part... until All For One mentions his indirect role in Dabi's descent into villainy, enraging Endeavor and leaving him vulnerable to a brutal counterattack.
      'All For One: (Chapter 354) But Hawks... Your timing doesn't quite match up. It almost seems like Endeavor's heart isn't in it? Behold, Endeavor. Everyone is fighting so hard to fulfill their role. Even the novices among them are focused on the battle at hand. So why does it feel like your head is somewhere else? Maybe because your masterpiece mopped up your failed experiment?! Aren't you delighted?! You should know, for ages now, I've had my eye on your twisted longing for power. And the thing about me is when I come across fertile ground, I can't help but sow seeds. You never did find Toya's body, did you?
  • Brilliant, but Lazy: All for One is a genius manipulator, but rarely demonstrates more than a surface-level handling of individual powers, meaning that people who've trained hard with their singular Quirk's limits can still hold an edge against him in skilled usage of their powers. His disinterest in training contrasts with Izuku's own exhaustive efforts to master One For All's Combo Platter Powers slowly but steadily over the course of the series.
  • Broken Pedestal:
    • He becomes this to Shigaraki, who begins to resent him after learning that All For One had planned to use his body as a vessel to steal One For All and starts actively resisting his attempts to possess him, eventually regaining control of his body after destroying his Vestige.
    • As of Chapter 384, he becomes this to Gigantomachia. After All For One frees Machia from Shinso's Brainwashing Quirk, Machia continues to attack him out of anger for being abandoned and left to rot during the Paranormal Liberation War Arc.
  • Brought Down to Badass: While his Quirk didn't get any weaker after his crippling fight with All Might, his body's condition did. Due to the horrible injuries All Might inflicted, he is severely limited in how much power he can output and how much damage he can take. Compounding this, his Quirk takes its own toll: there is a limit to how many Quirks he can safely hold, and since this is dependent on his physical condition, the number and strength of the Quirks he can have has gone down as well.
  • The Bully: At his core, All For One is this. For all his power and influence, All For One is nothing more than a narcissistic, psychopathic bully who just wants to lord his power over everyone and everything, and constantly mocks and belittles anyone brave enough to challenge him. In particular, his hatred of All Might stems from him dismantling his criminal empire and ruining his image of himself as this all-powerful demon lord.
  • Bullying a Dragon: Explicitly groomed Shigaraki to become a powerful and determined villain, and even handed him his original Quirk, with the purpose of hijacking his body and utilizing his rage to steal One For All. Too bad he didn't consider he did too good of a job in raising Shigaraki, and his forceful attempt at possession blows up in his face as a result.

    C-E 
  • Cain and Abel: He had a younger brother named Yoichi who had a strong sense of justice and opposed him. Yoichi became the first wielder of One For All and would create the line of heroes dedicated to ending All For One's evil.
  • Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality: Downplayed. All For One isn't completely delusional and is fully capable of understanding the reality of his situation and adapting it to suit it long-term plans with practiced skill. But as the series approaches the Final Battle, it becomes clear that on some level he genuinely does see the events unfolding around him like a real-life comic book, helped by the fact that he exists in a world with actual superpowers. He sees himself as a real life "Demon Lord" and sincerely refers to non-One For All users as "jobber characters" who only exist to showcase his strength in a fight. This mindset backfires on him constantly when those same "jobber characters" start turning the tables on him.
  • Can't Catch Up:
    • All For One acknowledges that as Quirks get stronger, there might be an upper limit to how powerful and complex of a Quirk his body is physically capable of containing, let alone stealing. Part of his entire plan for Shigaraki is to circumvent this by making his 'next me' so physically powerful this isn't an issue.
    • It becomes apparent that while All For One is capable of becoming stronger, One For All's ability to improve is superior to his own. With each transfer, it exponentially increases in power while also retaining and empowering their Quirks as well. All For One can only stockpile powerful Quirks and thus is limited to what he can find. In addition, he can't actually increase the power of the Quirks he's stolen unless he can find Quirks close enough that he can stack them on top of one another. It is greatly implied that part of All For One's obsession with One For All is his acknowledgement of this, as if he were to combine the Super-Empowering trait with his own stockpiled abilities and an extended lifespan in Shigaraki's enhanced body, he would effectively become a God in name and deed.
  • Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Later in the story, it's revealed that he knew who the holders of One For All were the entire time. He just let them live long enough to cultivate the Quirk and pass it on to a new wielder before he personally killed them. All to ensure that One For All would become as strong as possible before he stole it. Even after it grew powerful enough to overwhelm him, he refused to kill All Might or Midoriya and risk losing his prize before the next "him" could claim it.
  • Card-Carrying Jerkass: He's not only narcissistic, megalomaniac, and lacking any semblance of empathy; he revels in it. It goes a long way when, in Japanese, he's the only character whom the normally polite All Might refers to with the extremely hostile pronoun kisama.
  • Card-Carrying Villain: When All Might visit him in prison, he outright asks All For One for his motives. The villain plainly states that being "an all-powerful devil king" had always been his ambition. This sets All For One apart from the rest of the League and villains in a big way. He chose to be a villain entirely of his own free will for no other reason than that he wants to be. He knows he's evil, he simply doesn't care because being a demon king is his end goal in and of itself.
  • The Caretaker: He seemed to have been his younger brother's caretaker and did not seem bothered by it, as he was the only person All For One ever treated with anything close to genuine kindness, though even there he was possessive and controlling.
  • Casting a Shadow: Many of the Quirks he uses evoke darkness: his signature "All For One" manifests as red and black flames; the "Warping" Quirk is a pool of black liquid that emerges from those he teleports; and "Rivet Stab" manifests as red and black tendrils he extends from his fingers.
  • Cast from Lifespan: A Variant. After getting fatally torched by Endeavour's hands, he staves off immediate death by using Eri's Rewind Quirk as an Impromptu Healing Factor, undoing his present and long-term injuries in a matter of seconds, meaning his existence from that point onwards is owed squarely to this. However, he admits the ultimate end result will still be fatal for him regardless, and the speed at which he de-aged indicates that it's only a viable option for him alone because of his extensive lifespan letting him use it as an Hour of Power. Furthermore, he himself notes that whilst it prevents him from getting fatally injured, physically damaging him in this state causes the Rewind energy to work harder to undo the damage, burning through his remaining time quicker. By the time All Might confronts him once again, he's reverted into a teenager about Izuku and Tomura's age.
  • Charm Person: He possess a Quirk that lets him mind control a person by touching their head, though it seems to require constant contact.
  • Chekhov's Skill: His "Forcible Quirk Activation" was initially demonstrated at Kamino Ward when forcing the unconscious Kurogiri to create an exit portal for the League. This ability means that when he's later full-body paralysed by Stain's Bloodcurdle, he can still activate his Quirks, and uses that to messily escape his predicament.
  • Chuunibyou: Final Act shows that, in the end, he's nothing more than a grown-up version of an edgy middle schooler who's too obsessed with his comic books. The story goes to great lengths to show how dangerous it is to carry these immature delusions into adulthood, which combined with winning the Superpower Lottery make All For One into a whiny Spoiled Brat too used to getting everything he wants. Once things start going extremely poorly for him, All For One reveals his true nature as a Psychopathic Manchild and lashes out like a kid every few chapters or so. Hilariously, Tokoyami actually derides him for using "darkness" as a way of trying to rule the world through inciting chaos.
  • Classic Villain: A petty, psychopathic madman representing Greed and Pride to the extreme who is designed as the ultimate foil to All Might, Izuku, and the philosophy behind heroes as a whole.
  • The Coats Are Off: When he shows up to confront Izuku for their final battle, he does so with a similar suit and Cool Mask getup as when he confronted All Might at Kamino. However, Aoyama's surprise attack against him burns off part of the left sleeve, and he removes the whole jacket as he summons the villains en-masse.
  • Combat Pragmatist: For all his power, All For One is a very dirty fighter and will use any tactic to gain the advantage in a fight. He'll play mind games to get under his opponent's skin, use sneak attacks, take others as human shields, and even threaten innocent bystanders to win. In Volume Origin, he knew that Nana was using the final dregs of One For All, yet he does not hesitate to kill her with a massive explosion that ravages an entire island. During his fight with Endeavor, he immediately engages in psychological warfare, bringing up his abuse of his children to throw Endeavor off his game. Endeavor is able to ignore his taunting for the most part... until All For One mentions his indirect role in Dabi's descent into villainy, enraging Endeavor and leaving him vulnerable to a brutal counterattack.
  • Combat Tentacles: One of his Quirks, "Rivet Stab", manifests as black and red tendrils he extends from his fingers. He uses them to attack All Might, and as a contact point for his "Forcible Quirk Activation". The same ability manifests in Tomura Shigaraki, which he uses to skewer Endeavor and Bakugo.
  • Control Freak:
    • All For One is defined by his insistence of having everything play out according to his designs, especially when it comes to achieving control over people (notably Yoichi, his brother; and Tomura, the one he groomed) and being the one and only person to triumph against One For All. He is so intolerant of the slightest deviation from his script that whenever things like this happennote , he panics hard time. All For One's haste when things don't go his way, which manifests as sheer shortsightedness that repeatedly screws him over in the long runnote , is mocked and exploited by many characters in the story, including his own pawns.
    • Despite framing it as a voluntary choice for the Tartarus prisoners to join him upon their liberation, All For One actually took note of Stain leaving under his own terms and specifically prepared counter-measures against him because of it, aware that it was a sign Stain was against him and showing that he was only giving lip service towards the prisoner's options.
  • Cornered Rattlesnake: This aspect of him is hidden for a long time, because All For One hates losing so badly that he always exhaustively prepares before every engagement to reduce his chances of a true loss to nearly zero. However, when the heroes do actually manage to outmanoeuvre him in the final conflict, he demonstrates that if you actually gain an advantage over him that he can't deny, he'll snap, lashing out viciously with unrestrained power and none of his jovial mannerisms towards those who have seen him be so humiliated. This means that even when the heroes are perfectly countering every move he makes, it's still a highly dangerous situation that he can overturn in an instant should they get too successful.
  • The Corrupter:
    • Took Tenko Shimura, the grandson of his most hated adversary, and groomed him from childhood to become his own successor as a villainous symbol of evil.
    • In Vigilantes, All For One muses that he can turn anyone into a villain by either making their Quirks go berserk or igniting their rage to violent proportions.
    • It's later revealed that he was able to turn Aoyama to his side by offering them a Quirk, as said person was naturally born Quirkless, enabling them to live their dreams of being a hero before the demands he made of him in return for his 'favor' turned into a twisted nightmare for him. This is exactly what Yoichi warned the two unnamed individuals whom All For One demonstrated a similar 'deal' with about far in the past.
  • Costume Evolution: As his previous helmet was destroyed during his battle with All Might, for the final battle with Midoriya, All For One sports a sleeker, more futuristic version of his original helmet that somewhat resembles Kurogiri's. This helmet has more armored plating as it was able to withstand a slash from Hawks' feather blade, which makes sense as he was planning on facing Izuku in a fight and wanted his Achilles' Heel to have adequate protection against his raw power.
  • Crazy-Prepared:
    • He has Dr. Garaki replicate the Quirk All For One, takes the replica for himself, and gives the original to Shigaraki, after foreseeing his own defeat. He furthermore rigged the hospital data on Shigaraki's medical procedure to give an inaccurate timeline for the stabilization of his perfected body. This was set up back before All Might took him down at Kamino, months before Tomura even underwent the procedure.
    • He waxes poetic to Dabi about this principle of his in Chapter 335, making it clear that he's made full use of his extended lifespan to prepare every angle he can imagine guaranteeing his victory, regardless of what Spanner in the Works the heroes try to throw at him. Given this comes on the heels of him suffering his first actual setback against Star and Stripe, it underlines how much effort and preparation All For One has put into place before the series even began, that even that can be overcome eventually.
      All For One: Listen well... When I find myself with a goal, I'm sure to plan out a number of...routes to the goal, shall we say. To be exact, I weave my plots years or even decades prior, so that I may employ a viable route when the time comes. A route that inevitably achieves my ends.
    • Dabi's backstory in Chapter 350 reveals that All For One and Garaki ran an orphanage to groom several children in hopes of having a backup vessel if Shigaraki proves to be a failure.
    • After Endeavor manages to burn him alive with Prominence Burn, All For One reveals he has one last trump card: A version of Eri's Rewind Quirk recreated from the Quirk Destroying Bullets stolen by Shigaraki, which restores All For One back to his prime. He fully admits that he will likely be rewound out of existence and plans to make the most of it by freeing Shigaraki from the heroes' trap.
    • He sent Spinner to rescue Kurogiri from the hospital he'd been contained in with a recording of his voice to relay orders to him, since the Nomu was intentionally Locked Out of the Loop to prevent his abilities from aiding the villains. Despite Mic destroying the recording device, a desperate Spinner manages to place Tomura's blackened hand upon Kurorgiri's face whilst pleading with him to save Tomura, recalling how this roused Shigaraki to action once before. All For One reveals he was counting on this as a backup and implanted a microdevice within the hand that relayed his orders to Kurogiri regardless, enabling his Quirk to serve his interests once more.
  • Create Your Own Hero:
    • When he gave his brother the mediocre Power Stockpiling Quirk in an attempt to make his brother submit, it merged with his brother's then-unknown power-transfer Quirk, accidentally creating One For All. Out of a mix of greed, a need for control, and his obsession with the fantasy stories of his youth, All For One allowed this new Quirk to spread down a lineage of heroes until it evolved into the one Quirk powerful enough to defeat him no matter how much he stole from others.
    • A Downplayed example occurs with Izuku himself, appropriately enough. Izuku was already on the path to becoming the World's Strongest Man through One For All's Combo Platter Powers, and in All For One's crosshairs for possessing it, but it was a gradual process that came with the quirk slowly awakening over the course of an entire year, and Izuku's connection to the visages being spotty and infrequent, giving him significant hurdles in managing his new unexplained abilities. However, All For One's single-minded obsession with absorbing his brother's quirk induced him to make the attempt to steal it as soon as Tomura awakened with his quirk, resulting in the vestiges getting drawn out and strengthening their connection to Izuku through their mental tug-of-war. In the aftermath, the vestiges are able to frequently communicate and coach Izuku on how best to use their powers in tandem, resulting in his combat ability skyrocketing once he begins chaining his quirks together for increased effect. Mere months after the battle at Jaku hospital, Izuku's become strong enough to easily trounce All For One, even in his 'perfected Demon Lord' self in Tomura, a rapid power spike that wouldn't have occurred if All For One hadn't been too greedy. For bonus Irony, part of All For One's haste in stealing One For All from Izuku immediately was to deny him the chance to better master his powers before their showdown, only for his very attempts to prevent that to result in that exact outcome.
    • It's later revealed that he even more indirectly did this with All Might himself. All For One spoke with joy about about the "Dark age of Quirks" he ruled over where people lived in fear of the unknown menace that existed in society. Yet All Might's flashback to his first meeting with Nana Shimura revealed that it was precisely because of this state of affairs that All Might wanted to become a Hope Bringer in the first place, to save people from the oppression they lived under, eventually becoming a figure who would commit himself to undoing all the diabolical evil All For One spent decades creating.
  • Creator Thumbprint: In-universe example. Anyone with an extra Quirk can be traced back to All For One. The Artificial Humans/Nomus are a direct example. The users of One For All are an indirect example, as All For One had inadvertently created their Quirk. Izuku even gets mistaken as a minion of his thanks to his multiple abilities when saving civilians in the aftermath of the Paranormal Liberation War, which is only technically true.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: Receives a truly epic one from Izuku while in Tomura's body. Izuku has zero reasons to hold back, and so unleashes all of his power and rage on their shared vessel with each of his predecessors showing up as part of the attack rush, leaving All For One with a hole in his chest he needs to cover up without his Healing Factor. It's so bad it further shakes up the melding between himself and Tomura, with the vestige having to force Tomura to stay in place as he essentially fights two battles at once.
  • Dangerous Forbidden Technique:
    • Played With. His long-term goal runs counter to the idea of him ever risking himself from using powerful Quirks that could have dangerous consequences upon him if mishandled, thus there were sometimes abilities All For One encountered that were Too Awesome to Use even if he stole them. However, once his vestige self starts undergoing a Split-Personality Merge with Tomura to become the 'invincible Demon Lord' he dreamed about becoming, in a new and enhanced body capable of withstanding the strain of hosting multiple powers beyond his original self's capacity, All For One considers his original damaged body expendable, and has no problem using it with dangerous Quirks like Eri's Rewind Quirk is, content in the knowledge that he'll still live on as the 'Next Me' regardless of what happens to him. However, even then, he reserves actually using it for after Endeavor mortally wounds him anyway, since if he's going to die anyway, he might as well try it.
    • When the heroes start actually winning against him, beating him to the point that his body is smashed to pieces and only Rewind keeping him 'alive', he abuses the fact it undoes even otherwise-unhealable injuries to push his Quirks to the point that they'd negatively affect his physical body, creating a massive blade to slice off Machia's arm and a Wave-Motion Gun blast to tear apart the empowered dark Shadow, both of which destroy his arms from the sheer power, making it clear that it's a Desperation Attack for him.
  • Dark Is Evil: Wears dark clothes, has a black helmet, has dark-colored Quirks, and is the most powerful villain in the series. Hilariously, Tokoyami actually calls him out on embracing and furthering the stereotype of this trope so much, claiming that his understanding of 'Darkness' is dismal and muddy at best, punctuated by the empowered Dark Shadow making All For One look insignificant before it.
  • Dark Lord on Life Support: His previous battle with All Might has left him severely incapacitated. He has tubes running into his face and neck. When he finally steps outside, he wears a black mask that doubles as a life support system. After causing the Tartarus break-out, he literally has to carry the life-support machine from his cell with him. This is a major plot point during the Final Battle, as the heroes are entirely aware of this and make a point to target his life support. When it breaks for good, even though he's still able to move and fight somewhat his body won't respond like he wants it to, leaving him open to getting pummeled by Endeavor close-range and almost fatally incinerated to death. However, he reveals that he'd successfully managed to absorb a variant of Erik's Rewind Quirk from the Quirk Destroying Bullets before the fight to compensate for his lack of a Healing Factor going in, the Quirk's energy restoring his lost eyes and ears before the heroes' sight. Downplayed, however, as his words flat out imply, he expects to die in the process and is only trading one form of life support for another.
  • Dark Messiah:
    • All For One used his ability to grant powers to the oppressed Quirkless. This allowed him to amass an immense number of fanatical devotees whose gratitude grew into blind fanatics, who carried out his will even without his command. His Power Palms also feed into this, as they give him the appearance of a stigmata.
    • During Shigaraki's battle with the heroes, All For One waxes lyrical about this point, saying he wants to conquer the world to stop persecution. Despite this, it's also made clear that his preaching is simply nothing more than a poor cover for his desire to Take Over the World because he has the power and the ambition to.
      All For One: But under my rule, all will be exploited as the working class! All will be equal! Don't heroes yearn for world peace? Is it that hard to imagine taking a step towards that?
    • Once Eri's Rewind Quirk restores him to the prime of health, with his old unhealable injuries rewound to a point they never existed, the combination of his clothing having been burned off by Endeavour's prominence burn move, the Rewind energy covering parts of his body like divine energy and the paneling all frame him like a renaissance art painting, akin to The Creation of Man, a parallel furthered when he fashions a makeshift toga out of a nearby hero's cape. Despite his otherwise holy appearance, All For One ruminates that his dream ever since childhood has always been to obstruct the future of the world, just because that is something a villain does to be feared by all.
    • When he senses the Empowered Dark Shadow looming over him from behind, the framing of the paneling and the various Quirks he's attacking with giving him vaguely wing-like growths from his back make him look like an arrogant Fallen Angel proclaiming himself divine, only to be caught in the angry gaze of a true god for his act of hubris.
  • Deadly Upgrade: His words fully imply he expects using a copied version of Eri's Rewind to restore his body will be fatal. As a result, he only resorts to using it when Endeavor fatally burns him almost to ashes, as at that point he has nothing left to lose.
  • Death by De-aging: Discussed. He considers (or at least wants the heroes to think he does) his permanently-disfigured and broken body to be 'destined for the scrap heap' in favor of his ideal self as undergoing a Split-Personality Merge within Tomura's strengthened body, thus he has no issues using potentially dangerous but highly-useful abilities with his old body despite his entire endgame being to find a way to become an immortal and invincible demon lord. To this end, he 'tests out' a variant of Eri's Rewind Quirk he absorbed from the Destroying Bullets to see how it will affect his broken body in place of a proper Healing Factor, despite the potential risk of him having No Body Left Behind from mishandling the Quirk. This is in part because Endeavor manages to fatally burn him almost to ash, so he has nothing to lose.
  • Death Glare: As he's trying to fly off to rescue Tomura, he's still smug in the face of Hawks' attempts to stop him...until Hawks' points out Endeavor already beat him, prompting a hateful glare from All For One.
  • Deal with the Devil:
    • What his services amount to. Found yourself to be Quirkless or your own Quirk is detrimental? If you can find him, he'll gladly grant you a Quirk or take yours, in exchange for loyalty towards him. Practically everyone who sought his help including Aoyama's family found out the hard way. His ultimate plan is basically forcing everybody into one of these, by causing complete societal breakdown nationwide so he can step in and use his accumulated abilities to provide for the people's needs and restore order under his rule. People will be given whatever they desire to live a life of safety and comfort, but it will mean giving All For One complete power over them.
    • He grants Spinner two Quirks when he wants to be more powerful and useful to Shigaraki, but Spinner is burned in two ways by this. First, All For One is well aware if his plan succeeds, Shigaraki will effectively cease to exist and is no longer the one giving the orders Spinner is following, and second, the two Quirks begin to drive Spinner completely insane and turn him into Dumb Muscle. This effectively means Spinner is destroying his own mind for nothing.
  • Deconstructed Character Archetype: He intentionally plays into the role of a comic-book villain, but the Final Battle makes it repeatedly clear why this is a bad idea, enough to earn him his own folder.
  • Dented Iron: As unbelievably powerful as he is now, the injuries that All Might inflicted on him means he's nowhere near as powerful as he used to be. All Might notes this when All For One comments on his diminished strength, pointing to the life support system he constantly has to be on. This is exploited during the final battle as the main goal of the heroes is to weaken him by targeting his life support helmet. He in turn also exploits the state of his body as an excuse to test out extremely useful but potentially dangerous Quirks through it, before risking letting his 'Next Me' use them, such as Eri's Rewind Quirk to compensate for his lack of a Healing Factor, though he implies he fully expects it to still be fatal.
  • Determinator:
    • He is completely obsessed with claiming One For All for himself (as it houses the spirit of his younger brother whom he had always wanted by his side in his schemes). His ego even permeates his very Quirk: when his protégé Tomura undergoes the intense medical procedure to transfer it to himself, he finds his master's desire consuming his thoughts. He enacts multiple plans aimed squarely at breaking Izuku's willpower to increase his chances of success in their 'rematch' and makes it clear that he will stop at nothing until he can finally absorb the Quirk for good from him — even refusing to allow Izuku to be hit by Tomura's Decay wave, showcasing that this obsession runs counter to any pragmatic solutions to dealing with his 'nemesis'.
    • When Stain has successfully paralysed him and he's caught in a pincer move by him and All Might, still on the verge of being erased by Rewind, he escapes the apparently certain defeat by using a prepared couple of Quirks to counter Stain's power, forcibly expelling every last targeted drop of blood in his body just to regain his movement. It's only viable because of Rewind resting his lost fluids, but it illustrates the depths he'll sink to to avoid losing no matter the odds.
    • This trait pairs nastily with his Hope Crusher mindset, as he is willing to sink immense amounts of time, resources and effort solely into the petty goal of causing abject misery to those around him and enforcing his villainy. This is especially true for those who actually manage to bruise his immense ego and disrespect the "Demon Lord" with their defiance. He lampshades to All Might that tracking down his dead mentor's grandson and spending long years twisting him into a villain for him to fight against is exactly the kind of malicious scheme he'd commit. This thankfully backfires on him during the Final Battle, when his numerous humiliations cause him to fall for the heroes' provocations and waste valuable minutes of his Hour of Power trying to break them with the futility of fighting him, only realizing his mistake when he physically de-ages into a young adult.
  • Detrimental Determination: Whilst his sheer commitment towards embodying the role of a comic-book villain so utterly were what allowed him to carve out a successful generations-long reign as Japan's Shadow Dictator, by the final arcs it becomes clear that his same desire to control the narrative of the story to play out the way he wants it to be ultimately one of his biggest flaws. His eagerness to absorb One For All is such that he focuses on targeting Izuku the moment Tomura has awoken from his procedure, the Vestige of himself putting that goal first and foremost above crushing the army of heroes assembled before him, like Tomura wished to do, which spared enemies that would give his original self serious problems in battle later. This single-mindedness also benefited Izuku in the end, as All For One's failed attempt to absorb the Quirk instead drew out and strengthened the connection between the boy and the Vestiges of the past wielders. Previously, Izuku's unfamiliarity with the functions of his awakening Combo Platter Powers handicapped him using them in a fight without long periods of trial and error, but with the past wielders able to directly coach him on how best to use them, his effectiveness in combat dramatically increased, such that a few months after the War, he is argu the strongest hero opposing All For One, and utterly thrashes his "Next me" in combat so badly, it allows Tomura to easily regain control of himself. If All For One had been more patient and pragmatic in using Tomura's powers against his enemies as a whole, Izuku would not have become such a powerful figure so quickly.
  • Devil Complex: In his younger days, he was enamored with a demon king character in a manga he and his brother read. His admiration for the character inspired him to become the most powerful, influential villain the world has ever known. As he himself states at the end of chapter 297:
    All For One: This will be the story of how I become the greatest demon lord of all!
  • Diabolical Mastermind: He was considered the King of the criminal underworld before his imprisonment in Tartarus and was immune to the law because he kept his existence shrouded in myth.
  • Didn't See That Coming: This is All For One's general reaction throughout the final arcs of the series as his plans completely fall apart around him.
    • His plan to isolate and wear down Izuku during the Dark Hero arc fails because he didn't take into account that his friends at Class 1-A weren't just going to sit back and let him run himself ragged.
    • In both his fights with Star and Stripe and Armoured All Might, the concept of a genuine Heroic Sacrifice with no benefit to your wellbeing completely blindsides him, resulting in him showcasing a horrified reaction to his enemies' unorthodox tactics to take him down at any cost.
    • His plan to use Aoyama to lure Izuku away failed because he didn't think Aoyama would be brave enough to turn on him, nor did he expect Aoyama's friends would be willing to give him a second chance to atone for his mistakes, resulting in him getting lured into a trap instead.
    • He's shocked when the collective wills of those whose Quirks he stole start fighting back against him, allowing Team Endeavor to destroy his life-support mask and nearly burn him alive. It's only thanks to Eri's Rewind Quirk that he didn't die right then and there.
    • He admits to Hawks that he originally planned to utterly subsume Tomura's psyche into his own once he inherited his Quirk and was taken aback that Tomura's willpower enabled him to resist this to the degree of a Split-Personality Merge instead. His back-up plan of enacting a Fusion Dance between his original and copied vestiges to suppress Tomura for good also falls into this, as by the time he reveals this to the hero, Tomura's already destroyed his original Vestige, something All For One never anticipated as a possibility.
    • The idea that Gigantomachia's loyalty might actually have its limits never occurred to him. As a result, he expected Machia to instantly be on his side again the moment he was freed from the heroes' confinement. It turns out not only was Machia furious at being abandoned despite his loyalty, but his Super-Senses meant he realized it was All For One possessing Shigaraki that abandoned him. As such, he's caught flatfooted when Machia genuinely turns on him.
  • Didn't Think This Through:
    • A sure-fire way to get under his skin is pointing out that, despite his enamorment of Villains and desire to use the endless possibilities of Quirks to 'role-play' the Demon Lord in actuality, the very same comic book logic he so admires means that he's setting himself up to inevitably fail in the end, to which he usually responds by irritably claiming This Is Reality. Part of his Control Freak actions seem to be his earnest belief that, with the proper plan and sheer power behind him, he can control the narrative of events to prove that a Villain will win in reality...which compounds his ongoing Humiliation Conga throughout the Final Battle, as every single scheme and tactic he pulls to avoid this outcome implodes and only goes on to ensure his gradual defeat.
    • He hyper-focuses on Izuku as his one and only challenge to his ultimately victory in the setup for the final fight. Whilst he's proven correct that One For All's immense strength is the greatest threat to him in a fight, dismissing the other assembled heroes besides Izuku as irrelevant only allows them to repeatedly take him off-guard and gradually chip away at him despite the absurd range of abilities and powers he possesses in both bodies. This culminates in his original body actually dying, because he couldn't process the concept of the 'Demon Lord' having to struggle against 'mere gnats'.
    • He brainwashed Kurogiri to protect and serve Tomura Shigaraki, and to always follow his orders. When he's losing control of his possession over Tomura's body, he desperately orders Kurogiri to warp him away so he can stables himself. However, Kurogiri has enough of his original self left within to recognize that the being in command of said body is not Tomura, and so fails to respond.
    • All For One's Lack of Empathy and extreme pettiness means he only places value on The Power of Hate, and sets about making Tomura's life a hellish existence where he's given no reason but to abhor absolutely everything so he can be filled with enough rage to be used in stealing One For All through a forced Split-Personality Merge. All For One doesn't consider that perhaps this is really a case of him Bullying a Dragon, and it leads to Tomura blowing his vestige up from the inside to regain control of his body, now the true master of his almighty All For One Quirk and the true Big Bad of the series.
    • His desire to be an absolute villain Hated by All meant that, despite him lording his past success as the Shadow Dictator of Japan as either intimidation against his enemies or incentive for others to cooperate with him, when he actually lost to All Might, nobody wanted to remember him and his vile actions, resulting in him effectively becoming a faceless nobody by the present day. Though he sets up multiple intricate plans to regain his former glory and more, as these repeatedly fail by the story's climax, it just throws into perspective how pathetic he actually is underneath his intimidating exterior as the 'Symbol of Evil'. His attempt to intimidate the various 'Jobber characters' for trying to defeat him just has Inasa point out that he's literally a forgotten remnant of history that nobody wants around, which he considers an insult to the reputation of the immovable evil the 'Demon Lord' is supposed to embody.
  • Disability Immunity: Although he never realized it until it was too late, him losing his eyes and relying on sensor-type Quirks to "see" made him impossible to fool with sight-based illusions. Once he regains his vision with Rewind, he completely gets distracted with killing a fake Hawks conjured up by Camie.
  • Discard and Draw:
    • Apparently, he used to have a very different power set when he first fought All Might. In a flashback showcasing his fight with Nana Shimura, he is seen utilizing gruesome landscape-altering Quirks. In the Kamino Ward battle, he seems to prefer strong ranged abilities paired with diversions and attrition strategies, specifically to counter All Might's Lightning Bruiser abilities and exploit his Hour of Power weakness until he can no longer use his Quirk at all.
    • During the fight with team Endeavor they deduce that he lacks the Hyper Regeneration or any similar Quirks on him, meaning the injuries deal to him with stick. However, after Endeavor managed to scorch him to a charcoaled husk with a point-black Prominence Burn, he mocks the heroes for thinking he's show up for the Final Battle without a trick up his sleeve to compensate, revealing he'd managed to absorb a variant of Eri's Rewind Quirk from the Destroying Bullets Tomura salvaged, using that to undo his injuries instead despite the potential risks from mishandling the Quirk, due to seeing (or wanting the heroes to think he does) his old crippled body as disposable next to the perfected body he has in Tomura. With his body now back in the prime of health, he's twice as dangerous as he was before with no weakness the heroes can exploit, but he also acknowledges that this state is only temporary and will eventually result in him vanishing regardless, so he intends to make the most of it breaking his 'Next Me' free of the heroes' trap.
  • Disc-One Final Boss: Despite being the one of the two Big Bads of the series, he's defeated by All Might in their final battle and is imprisoned. This enables Tomura to be the sole Big Bad and the new leader of the League of Villains. Eventually subverted when All For One’s consciousness possesses Tomura and frees his original body from prison, becoming the Big Bad once more. However, during the Final Battle, the damage inflicted onto Tomura's body allows him to gradually regain control of himself as his master loses a battle fought on two fronts, and eventually usurps control once again, additionally tearing his vestige self to pieces to prevent further takeovers, becoming Izuku's sole final opponent once again. In essence, despite his utter refusal to cede the position of 'main villain', All For One's actions only proved he simply didn't have what it took to retain it anymore. By the end, Shigaraki doesn't give him a choice in the matter and forcibly takes the mantle of Big Bad for himself.
  • Dramatic Irony:
    • He became a young Tenko Shimura's foster father after the death of his family, and was (initially) a better father-figure to him than his own biological father ever was. And then his ultimate plans for Tomura proved so horrific for him that the ghost of said father even tried to save him from accepting All For One's Quirk and the side-effects that came with it, only to be rejected because of his prior abuse of the boy and his viewing his actions as 'rejecting' him again.
    • In the lead up to the Final Battle, All For One is constantly going on about how his victory is inevitable and he's planned for everything...while the audience sees the heroes are completely on to his plan and making their own massive counter plan. In fact, said plan relies on letting All For One think exactly that.
    • The original All For One is confident if he makes it back to U.A. in time, he can salvage his "next me" and still achieve his goal. The audience learns well before All For One himself that Shigaraki finally took his body back thanks to Midoriya and company's efforts on top of Shigaraki being much harder to bury than All For One believed. What's more, Shigaraki rejects the prospect of actually stealing One For All period, meaning the goal All For One has spent the entire series striving for just went up in smoke and he doesn't even know it yet. His Evil Gloating to Hawks underscores this, as he intends to get rid of Shigaraki's psyche for good through a Fusion Dance between his original and copied vestiges, a plan non-viable by the time he reveals it because Shigaraki blew up his original vestige when he wrested control over himself away from his master.
  • The Dreaded: Though his threat has largely been diminished, when he showed up in person, even Midoriya, who went toe-to-toe with Stain and Muscular, was left frozen in terror, likening the experience to "seeing death". He, and the students who were with him, could be seen on the brink of throwing up out of sheer fear.
  • Drunk on the Dark Side: Back in his prime, he clearly reveled in the newfound status his Quirk gave him, at one point bragging to his brother about how his followers killed a group of people who refused to follow him even though he didn't order them to. It's clear he never stopped being drunk on the sheer power and potential his Quirk gave him at the expense of others, and a large aspect of his Evil Plan is to set up a situation that will allow him to lord his power and control over everybody forever, after All Might successfully stripped him of his empire and limited what he could do with his original body.
  • Dude, Where's My Respect?: A Zigzagged case. When introduced, he is a feared and respected villain, with a long history of evil actions and at the height of his power was once the Shadow Dictator of Japan so feared and powerful that it took an equally formidable figure, somebody whose deeds are likened to a demigod's status, to take him down. Even weakened, he still commands dread and respect from those who know him and his plans with the League of Villains results in them getting an immense boost in prestige in the criminal underworld just from being associated with a legendary figure like him. However, by the time of the final battle, while he's still regarded as a dangerous foe, the heroes are ready and willing to fight back. And this infuriates All For One to the point that he starts ranting about how they've been too spoiled by All Might's era of peace to know how dangerous he really is.
  • Dystopia Justifies the Means: According to Aoyama, All For One's endgame is to plunge the entire world into social instability and anarchy to the point villains run rampant and things are hanging by such a thread that the slightest shortage of anything, be it food, water, or power, will give All For One the chance to swoop in with his stockpiled Quirks and force his will on them. All For One has no greater goal or philosophy he wants to enforce by taking over, taking over and ruling as an Evil Overlord is his endgame in and of itself. All For One admits this isn't 100 percent accurate, but close enough. When he specifies later, he reveals his real goal is to 'thwart the future of the whole world' solely to be as hated as he possibly can.
  • Emotional Powers: Double Subverted. All Quirks seem to be this by default, but due to his nature, All For One could never actually use them this way, only able to wield the base strength of a Quirk without being able to push it to the limit. This was disguised by the sheer power he can wield inventively combining multiple powers together, but when even that fails to defeat the heroes barraging him from all sides, he snaps, reaching a Rage Breaking Point that he then channels into his Quirks to unleash enough power to devastate their assembled army. He expresses unfamiliarity with the sensation and attributes it to his Psychic Link with Tomura reaching greater synchronisation, rather than anything he was capable of on his own, being so unused to the feeling of pure rage that his attacks damage him as badly as they do the heroes and he's reliant on Rewind to stay alive.
  • Empty Eyes: Though they're absent for the majority of his appearances due to his facial injuries, they are briefly shown to be this during the flashback of his rise of power and after his battle with Endeavor, reflective of All For One's heartless and self-centered nature. When his vestige self begins enacting a Split-Personality Merge between himself and Tomura's psyches to revive himself as a "more perfect Demon Lord", Tomura's eyes being to take on this trait whenever the All For One vestige is in control. However, when the 'Tenko Shimura' personality surfaces, his eyes regain their pupils for an instant, before visibly changing back to their prior dead-eyed state as the merged All For One/Tomura reasserts command, showing they're indicative of who's driving their shared body.
  • Enfant Terrible: After Armored All Might's No-Holds-Barred Beatdown against him to cause Rewind to make him disappear, he's regressed to a young boy by Chapter 400, who fittingly looks like a heavily-mutated version of the Luminescent Baby due to him glowing brightly like the first ever Quirk-user and still retains his desire to kill All Might.
  • Enhanced Punch: Attempted against All Might by mashing a dozen or so physical Quirks together. It's more for a symbolic reason than a pragmatic one; by destroying the Symbol of Peace with the same technique he usually employs, he hopes to shatter the populace's faith in heroes. Notably, this proves to be a mistake on his part.
  • Equal-Opportunity Evil: Is fully aware of the world's injustices but, instead of doing anything about it, intends for everybody to be forced to live in the same squalor as a twisted form of equality once he acquires One For All, with only himself and his allies at the top to enjoy the spoils.
  • Everyone Has Standards: Discussed. As he notes to Hawks, even in a world such as theirs with differing cultures and views on what defines 'good' and 'evil', there are still some actions that are held to be universally repugnant or vile by everybody... so he wants to commit as many of those actions on as grand a scale as possible just so everyone who hears his name will consider him an evil villain, as he judges the success of one's villainy to be measured by how much they're despised by the masses.
  • Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
    • Played With. All For One truly seems to care for his younger brother, Yoichi. Despite his rebelling against him, he repeatedly tried finding a middle ground. He gave Yoichi a Quirk to help him get stronger, even making sure his body would be able to handle it. His love is such that he even shed Berserker Tears while killing the Second User in clear anger over Yoichi's death. However, it is clear that he sees his sibling as an extension of himself, rather than a full person, and his quest to take One For All can be seen as him trying to retrieve a piece of himself that refuses to comply. This is best shown when they interact in the vestige world of One For All.
      All For One: It's such a shame that I could never make you mine!
    • At first, he seemed to genuinely care about Shigaraki and wanted him to be his successor, but like his brother, he sees Shigaraki as little more than an extension of himself and he was merely grooming him to becoming his next vessel.
  • Even the Loving Hero Has Hated Ones: Invoked: All For One wants to be as loathed and hated as physically possible. As such, it's no surprise that by the end game, even the most idealistic and loving heroes such as Deku absolutely despise him. While the rest of the villains are slated for capture if at all possible by the heroes' final gambit, their plan notably entails having Endeavor flat out kill him rather than try to recapture him.
  • Evil Cannot Comprehend Good:
    • Fitting for someone titled the "Symbol of Evil", All For One is unable to understand concepts such as morality or selflessness and only views people as tools to be used and discarded at his pleasure. And this constantly blindsides him during the final arcs of the story. His plan to isolate Midoriya fails because he never imagined his friends would step in to save him, his fight with Star and Stripe ends in failure because he didn't anticipate her pulling a Heroic Sacrifice, and he ends up Lured into a Trap by the heroes because he didn't expect Aoyama to turn on him for his friends nor that his friends would forgive Aoyama and give him a chance to atone.
    • He genuinely believes that becoming a Hated by All Evil Overlord will ensure he's recognized forever in history as an vile monster who stands at the apex of villainy. As pointed out in the Final Battle by Inasa, while his reign is taught about in history, no one had ever even heard of All For One because no one wants to remember him, as there is no historical lessons to be gained from knowing about such a thoroughly self-centred individual. This thought seems to have never occured to All For One.
  • Evil Counterpart:
    • All Might is an incredibly kind and upstanding man who fights For Great Justice, while All For One is a Card-Carrying Villain who does all he does For the Evulz. Both are mentors with reverent disciples, with numerous So Proud of You moments. However, All Might met Midoriya by chance, while All For One gleefully exploited the trauma Tenko suffered in order to turn him into his protégé. While All Might is something of a bumbling teacher who tries to let Midoriya find his own way, All For One goes to incredible lengths to prepare Shigaraki and gives him all the resources he needs to lead the League of Villains. All Might is a Lightning Bruiser who beats foes with nothing but sheer speed, power, and his own hand-to-hand combat technique. While All For One is a Power Parasite who uses a gruesome multitude of powers in unusual combinations for devastating effects. Both are Stepford Smilers, yet All Might does this to inspire hope, while All For One enjoys breaking his victims.
    • To Midoriya as well. Both started as relative nobodies who happened to attain extremely powerful Quirks that can stockpile multiple abilities for personal use. Both have an inner obsession bordering madness that drives them and both are charismatic leaders. All For One's signature colors are red and black, while Midoriya's are green and white. All For One is a Manipulative Bastard while Midoriya is The Strategist. Midoriya has difficulty in controlling One For All because his body cannot handle much output. All For One faces a similar issue: some Quirks are too advanced for his body to handle. Further illustrating this is that Midoriya is the endpoint of the long string of inheritance behind One For All that began with All For One himself, the Quirk slowly gaining greater purpose as it passes from hero to hero until it ends up in his hands. All For One is the beginning of the story's conflict, and Midoriya is tasked with bringing about its end. Another interesting note is that, similar to Midoriya and Shigaraki both sporting red shoes, Midoriya receives a final version of his costume with gold highlights for the final battle that matches All For One's perfected mask's own gold highlights.
    • To Endeavor. Both are terrible fathers who submit their children to harsh abuse that eventually mold them into villains. While Endeavor comes to be deeply ashamed of his past actions and how they turned Toya into Dabi, All For One is incapable of such remorse.
      All For One: Pitting One For All against Tomura is a deadly knife's edge to dance upon. But the most brutal part of this little scheme has to be you forcing your youngest to clean up your own mess, no matter how much it pains him. And the unceasing abuse toward your eldest child!
    • Ends up one to Bakugo, interestingly enough. All For One's belief that Quirks dictate the entirety of a person's value instead of the other way around is an uncanny mirror of Bakugo's own belief system at the beginning of the series. As Bakugo fights his vestige in Shigaraki's body, he essentially comes face to face with an incredibly warped version of himself and once again affirms he was wrong to treat Midoriya how he did and is finally ready to step up as a real hero.
      Bakugo: You wanna talk about some big disparity? Lack of understanding? Dread? Guess what - I've long since taken all that crap to heart. And I've seen a real step toward progress, with all that. It might take time, but some people I know are trying to push forward. Thanks anyway, but you can shove your sermon, ya nutsack-faced handy-man!
    • In a more humorous twist compared to the previous examples, he ends up one to Tokoyami as well thanks to the two of them being Chuunibyou. The young man lectures him on spreading "muddied, dismal darkness" during his reign of terror in the past, and summons an overwhelming attack through Abysall Black Body: Light of Baldur with the aid of Pixie-Bob.
  • Evil Is Cool: An In-Universe example; All for One used to be an avid comic reader in his youth. He states that he identified with and appreciated the villains of the story more than the heroes of the story, and this served as a reason why he decided to become a villain later on. Deconstructed as the nature of this trope shows just how shallow and childish All for One is beneath his grandiose reputation.
  • Evil Is Petty: While All For One has higher goals and ambitions, he can't resist committing smaller acts of sadism, especially when it involves All Might.
    • He claims to All Might that his taking in young Tenko to be his protégé wasn't done just to have a successor, but to give a giant middle finger to both All Might and Nana Shimura by raising her grandson as a villain, pointing out how such a low blow is exactly the sort of thing he would do. Likewise, when giving Tenko the hands for his villain outfit, one of those hands (the one on the back of his head) is revealed to be Nana Shimura's, showing just how far he went to defile his legacy.
    • In the movie, Two Heroes, when he learns of Wolfram's plot, he grants him a Quirk to aid him - completely expecting Wolfram to lose anyway - just so he can give All Might more grief with the knowledge that his former sidekick turned to villainy.
    • If he sees somebody with a Quirk that he wants, he'll take it regardless of the practicality of it, simply because he desires to, and he'd rather go through immense effort to keep what he's stolen than surrender any of it. This is part of his mad obsession with One For All — because it is the one Quirk that can resist his Power Parasite ability, he desires it all the more strongly.
    • When the vestige of himself merged into Tomura is on the verge of killing Bakugo, he uses the latter's helplessness against his sheer power to deride his dreams of becoming number one hero in a world where he can to contend against the power level of One For All and All For One, mocking him that he'll forever be a side character in Izuku's story no matter how hard he tries. Notably, despite the mental fusion ongoing between Tomura and All For One making it unclear which one exactly is in command of the body, its made crystal clear that this sadistic mockery of a child's hopes and dreams right as he's about to perish anyway comes squarely from All For One.
    • Deconstructed, as the heroes realize how petty All For One is and that it's an easily exploitable way to manipulate him. The make heavy use of this throughout the Final Battle, playing him on multiple occasions.
  • Evil Gloating:
    • Beffiting his nature as a blatant Card-Carrying Villain, it's not enough for him to defeat his enemies, he has to go out of his way to mock and belittle them the whole way too, rubbing their defeat in their faces and deriding them for ever believing they could overcome him. He goes on extensive monologues to highlight how badly they've failed to stop them, how useless their efforts were, and how they should feel bad and/or foolish for even trying, all with his signature grin on his face and wrapped in a veneer or politeness.
    • He uses this to great effect when manipulating his enemies to act the way he wants them to. When Izuku leaves UA after the Paranormal Liberation War, All For One takes advantage of Izuku's Chronic Hero Syndrome by planting a seed of fear in the boy via a holographic message telling him that he is now All For One's main focus, complete with a villainous inversion of All Might's last words as a hero; "Now it's your turn!" As he predicted, this leads Izuku to isolate himself from any and all support for fear of them getting caught in the crossfire while desperately trying to find the villain, making Izuku an easier target for AFO's hired guns.
  • Evil Overlord: His ultimate dream is to become an invincible demon king. What we know of his reign before All Might defeated him implies he had basically become Japan's Shadow Dictator. This time around, he wants to not only be much more overt, but Take Over the World and turn it into a dystopia bound to his will.
  • Evil Plan:
    • Chapter 329 has him confirm privately to Spinner that all the events that have proceeded in the manga thus far are part of his overarching grand ambitions, but that, contrary to what the latter thinks, it is not merely to steal One For All for himself— rather, that is the 'Midgame Goal' and a necessary step for him to achieve his final objective, though he's intentionally unclear about what exactly that is, save that he's been preparing for it for a long time with his extended lifespan.
      All For One: I've planned ahead for a long life.
    • Aoyama reveals that his parents told him something of All For One's overall goals. Firstly, the societal breakdown he's created in Japan has tanked the value of the yen and forced multiple Japanese corporations into bankruptcy, in tandem with All For One's allies in other counties enacting coordinated uprisings to further spread the chaos worldwide. Thus, internal aid will not be sent to stabilize Japan as said countries work on prioritizing their own stability and Japan's society devolves into one seeking stability at any cost. All For One would then monopolize certain quirks he's stockpiled over the years to provide necessary resources for the citizens, such as water or electricity on demand, taking control of the country and rebuilding it in his image, before using that as his starting point to turn his attention to subjugating other countries as well. All For One admits that said Aoyama's explanation isn't 100% accurate, but is close enough to outline the idea. He later espouses to Hawks that his actual motive is simply to become Hated by All, and that trashing the world's economy is merely another step to arrive at that goal.
  • Evil Smells Bad: Not him, but the black ooze used for his Warping Quirk is said to smell really bad:
    Twice: This black stuff reeks! I love it!
  • Evil Sounds Deep: Comes with being voiced by Akio Ōtsuka. John Swasey gives him a menacingly deep voice as well, helped by the filter in his helmet.
  • Eviler than Thou: Pulls a version of this on Tomura when he does his grand reentry into the story employing Grand Theft Me on him to hijack his body and free his original self from Tartarus. He claims to genuinely respect Tomura and his tenacity, and wants to merge their personalities together into one superior being so he can become a Physical God, yet it becomes clear this amounts to just creating a superior clone of himself at Tomura's expense. Eventually, however, Shigaraki manages to pull this on him instead, destroying his vestige and retaking his body from All For One's control.
  • Expy: All For One is one to both Darth Vader and Palpatine from Star Wars. Like the former, his body is damaged and as a result he wears a life support system; and he also has the trollish dick tendencies and evil mastermind skills of the latter.
  • Eyeless Face: No nose either. Everything above his upper lips is nothing but a mass of scar tissues. This winds up biting him in the ass during the Final Battle, as despite compensating for his destroyed senses with any sensory quirks he could find, these are no true substitute or replacement for his original senses, and the fact he has to rely on a crutch like a quirk to fight anywhere close to his original power means that when that crutch is unexpectedly removed, he's left extremely vulnerable and unable to keep track of his opponents in a pitched fight, which they don't hesitate to exploit for all it's worth. This ceases to be the case after he uses a variant of Eri's Rewind quirk to compensate for his lack of healing, the Quirk rewinding his crippled body to a point before All Might permanently injured him.

    F-H 
  • Face Framed in Shadow: Most of the flashback sequences have him as this. Even in sections where his facial features are mostly visible and intact, there is always a black band of shadow placed over his eyes, evoking his present appearance, as well as symbolising his true heartless nature underneath his polite mannerisms.
  • The Faceless: His face is first hidden in shadow, then by his mask. Even after All Might breaks it off, he still kind of counts. The clearest image of his face shown so far in the manga is shown hanging over the UA traitor's head, visually demonstrating the absolute control he has over them. When Endeavor nearly kills him with a point-blank Prominence burn, he activates the variant of Eri's Rewind quirk he managed to scavenge from the Destroying Bullets to counter the damage, rewinding not only his present injuries, but his past, unhealable ones, demonstrated by his face regrowing his eyes and ears once more.
  • Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: When Eri's harvested Rewind energy restores his original appearance, undoing the otherwise unhealable disfigurements that were his trademark appearance before, he's revealed to have this. Fitting of a man whose charisma and manipulation skills with the masses were one of his greatest assists in tandem with his powers, his appearance is that of a ruggedly handsome man, not too dissimilar to that of an idealized hero, and the paneling even frames him as if he were a messiah figure gazing down upon those beneath him. However, everything about his actual personality demonstrates him to be one of the evilest, twisted and morally irredeemable villains in the series, and his almost angelic grace is offset by his soulless gaze hinting at his true monstrous nature behind his superficial charms. Taken even further in Chapter 382 when he rewinds further into a teenager.
  • Facial Horror: All Might left his head so mangled that the top half of his head is nothing but a mass of scar tissue with no eyes, nose, or ears. He originally had white hair and red eyes. It doesn't get any better-looking when his missing features start growing back.
  • Failed a Spot Check: For such a meticulous and detail-oriented man, All For One is too self-absorbed to notice when things go wrong right under his nose, such as when his vestige's focus on absorbing all of Tomura's rage and hatred into himself leaves him completely blind to Tomura's remaining good qualities in his old identity as Tenko. Upon discovering the "fissure within", he quickly realizes it leaves him in the worst position possible to steal One For All, as the Split-Personality Merge he'd invested 16 years into creating is at serious risk of being undone if the heroes keep hitting him with enough attacks for Tenko to fight back and resist.
  • Fatal Flaw:
    • While All For One has many flaws that contribute to his ultimate defeats, the one that actually spells his downfalls is spite. He refused to read the comic books he enjoyed to the end because he didn't like how the stories always had them lose in the end, and wanted to 'correct' that in reality when he discovered his powers. Yoichi pointing this out to him again as adults when he was revelling in his success as a villain had him spitefully force the stockpiling power Quirk onto him to likewise 'overwrite the reality' where his brother refused to join him, creating One For All and his greatest opposition as a consequence. All For One has a pathological need to destroy his most hated enemies in the most spiteful, hope crushing way possible. His second defeat to All Might is the direct result of this, trying to kill him in the most ironic way he could think of and crush Japan's spirit in the process, only to put himself in range of his finishing move. He's Lured into a Trap in the final battle precisely because the heroes realize this flaw and exploit it, knowing he couldn't resist crushing Deku with mass overkill out of spite. Even after being reduced to ash and having to use Rewind, he's easily distracted from actually meaningfully using it because he's too spiteful not to be provoked by the heroes' heroic speeches and having his ego bruised. Even upon eventually beating them, the defiance the heroes show towards him regardless visibly tempts him into continuing to try and break them before he composes himself and rationalizes that he needs to make his remaining time count.
    • All Might himself banks on this flaw to halt All For One and buy time, as even though he's lost his Quirk and is no threat to All For One, he knows All For One is such a petty, vindictive man that he won't be able to resist confronting and crushing the one man on the planet he hates more than anyone else no matter how little time he has remaining.
  • Faustian Rebellion: The entirety of One for All's legacy became this against him, starting when he gave his brother a Quirk which created One for All by accident, and started rolling forward after the Second user passed it on before All For One got to him. Despite knowing exactly who were the current holders following that, he decided to wait until it reached its zenith so he could take One for All for himself and reap its power, except it eventually became his downfall once it reached All Might and Midoriya.
  • Faux Affably Evil: All For One is polite and cordial towards everyone and his incredible charisma allowed him to amass a following of devoted servants when he ruled Japan. That said, he often laces his politeness with barbs and jabs at his opponents and views everyone as beneath him.
    • This is best seen when All Might visits him in prison. At first, he greets All Might as if they were two old friends, but soon tries to get under his skin by making an educated guess about the current state of society and mocking All Might's powerlessness, smiling all the while.
    • All For One offered support to the traumatized Tenko Shimura. Even when he repeatedly failed, All For One calmly encouraged to him to keep trying. However, he slowly warped Tenko's mind against heroes while keeping him emotionally dependent on him: he sees even him as nothing more than a pawn for his twisted ideals.
    • When he meets Yoichi Shigaraki and Nana Shimura in the vestige world, All For One treats the whole thing as if it's a big family reunion, but his polite conversation is laced with insults towards Nana and Midoriya.
  • Finishing Move: He tries one against All Might, combining Springlike Limbs, four Kinetic Boosters, three Strength Enhancers, Proliferation, Hypertrophy, Rivet and Spearlike Bones into his right arm for a devastating blow, in sync with Impact Recoil to crush All Might's attempt to block. Ultimately, this was an error.
  • Flat Character: Strip away the grand verbose and intimidating aura, and there's not much to All For One as a character beyond Jerkass Card-Carrying Villain. This becomes a major factor in his downfall in the end, as one of the major themes of the story is change and personal growth. Every major character, including Shigaraki, eventually matures and develops. All For One, by comparison, doesn't undergo any arc or growth, and is the exact same monster he was in his prime. This makes him incredibly easy to predict, as the heroes exploit All For One's chronic need to torment his opponents and lure him into their own trap.
  • Foreshadowing:
    • During the vestige vision Izuku receives upon beginning to pass the singularity with One For All, Yoichi is seen futility attempting to prevent his brother from preforming a quirk transfer between a quirkless person and a Quirk-user whose mutation has warped his appearance and lead to him offering Fantastic Racism, warning the two that taking his offer would be nothing but harmful for them in the long run. It's later shown that taking a similar deal was how All For One was able to create the U.A. traitor, a fact they very much regret by the present time.
    • His inability to comprehend altruism, on full display during his battle with All Might in Kamino Ward, plays into the later reveal that his psychopathic nature handicaps his ability to steal One For All. As he can't understand what it's like to care for something beyond your own wellbeing, he cannot grow as a character, and thus has remained the exact same Card-Carrying Jerkass for generations. This is why One For All can't be assimilated by his Power Parasite abilities, as it is comprised of people whose collective Heroic Willpower are too strong for him to ever overcome without a strong emotion like Shigaraki's hatred.
    • He waxes lyrical to the immobile Izuku and Nana Shimura when they briefly meet inside the vestige realm during his first attempted absorption of One For All, mentioning his own experiences with the vestiges of his former victims and how they were antagonistic towards him in his dreams until he passed the associated quirk to another. This antagonism comes to the fore during his battle with Team Endeavor, as Jiro's defiance of him and resolve to fight regardless of his power succeed in motivating all the vestiges stored within himself to rebel against him as one, leaving him vulnerable at a crucial moment and allowing the heroes to badly damage his life-support mask before he regains control.
    • When All Might first talks about him, he brings up how he's Shrouded in Myth and the only knowledge about his existence as Japan's past Shadow Dictator is rumors on the internet, emphasizing his unseen menace brought back by his re-introduction into the present narrative. All Might even admits that he didn't talk about him before because he thought he'd dealt with him for good and didn't see any reason to burden Izuku with the knowledge then. During the Final Battle, this gets thrown back in All For One's face to his detriment: far from his monstrous villainy making him a feared villain who terrorizes everyone and will be remembered forever in infamy, it just means that nobody wants to remember him or talk about him, and history books have intentionally ignored any recollection of him while retaining the relevant lessons from the Dark Age of Quirks, dooming All For One to being a non-entity in the grand scheme of history.
  • For the Evulz: To put it simply, All For One doesn't care for anyone and has only three interests in life: rule the world from the shadows; enjoy himself at the expense of everyone before discarding them note  and steal One For All some day.
  • Full-Frontal Assault: During the final battle Endeavor's Prominence Burn obliterates his clothing and Cool Mask as he activates Eri's quirk to reverse the physical damage. After he is healed All For One is left completely in the buff and barely obscured by the smokey aftereffects of the flames and the rewind energy bursting from his rejuvenated body. His first order of business is to immediately steal makeshift clothing from his opponents before resuming the fight.
  • Gambit Roulette: Forced into playing this at the story's climax, as his more conventional plans go up in smoke and he has no other option but to put all his chips into a few random strategies he cobbles together either immediately before the Final Battle or during it. It's also implied that luck had played a major role in his plans even before being driven to this point.
  • Game-Breaking Injury: His first battle with All Might left him barely alive with most of his head destroyed. As he couldn't obtain a regeneration Quirk until after it had partially healed, he was left with most of his sensory organs destroyed, severely weakened ability to use his Quirk, and dependent on constant life support to survive. While he is a force to be reckoned with, he's nowhere near as powerful as he was in his prime.
  • God-Emperor: His true endgame is to rule humanity as a functional deity, accumulating so much strength and so many Quirks using Shigaraki's body that the world will have no choice but to depend on him for resources after throwing the global economy into chaos. The only obstacles in his way after forcing All Might into an early retirement and eliminating Star and Stripe, deterring foreign countries from aiding Japan, are Izuku and Japan's remaining heroes. If he were to acquire One For All, this goal would become a certainty and the world would be trapped in a shadow dictatorship for the rest of time.
  • Godzilla Threshold: He managed to get a copy of Eri's Rewind Quirk from the Quirk-Destroying bullets, but it runs the risk of deaging the target until they cease to exist, and he phrases using it at all as a 'big sacrificial moment', implying he doesn't expect to survive using it. As a result, despite being clearly losing, having his Quirks rebel and his life support mask destroyed, he still doesn't use it until Endeavor has fatally burned him nearly to ashes.
  • Good Powers, Bad People: A given, considering the huge number of Quirks he stole across his infamous career, many of them most likely belonged to heroes and innocent civillians, like O'Clock's Overclock, Ragdoll's Search, Hawks' Fierce Wings, and the unnamed floating Quirk that is all but confirmed to be Nana's. All of which he uses bring misery to those around him.
  • Greater-Scope Villain: For the entire franchise.
    • All Might put an end to a criminal empire that ruled Japan from the shadows when he defeated All For One for the first time. Since then, the villain pivoted his influence and resources to raising Shigaraki into a proper successor by creating the League of Villains for him to lead. Furthermore, he is the presiding evil across the entire timeline from the first generation of Quirk users all the way up to the present, and he comes back with a vengeance for the story's Final Act to reclaim the title of Big Bad for himself. This is ultimately a Subverted Trope, however, as despite all the build up, All For One's numerous flaws come to the forefront and demonstrate that his unwillingness to grow or change makes him only a supplementary threat to the series' true main antagonist, Shigaraki. Without him, Shigaraki wouldn't be as big of a threat as he is, but he still unwittingly hands him the keys to becoming the superior villain because All For One can't truly accept anybody would be able to outwit him.
    • He's this in the first movie. When villains got together to steal David Shield's device, All For One made a point of granting their leader extra superpowers. The idea of All Might finding out his best friend is doing something evil put a smile on his face.
    • Is also one for the prequel My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, shepherding his underlings Hachisuka and Number 6 to wreak havoc on Tokyo, particularly Koichi and Pop's home turf of Naruhata. He makes them conduct Trigger and Bomber experiments which serve as the main conflicts of the story, which eventually leads to him and Garaki developing the Nomu we see in the main series.
  • Greed: All For One's Quirk is an embodiment of this, allowing him to amass unchecked power at a whim. He even admits that he can't resist stealing a Quirk that catches his interest.
  • Handicapped Badass: He was blind and relied on an "Infrared Ray" Quirk to faintly sense sounds and vibrations, so to remain aware of his surroundings. He was also heavily implied to be in declining health, given his constant need for life-support systems. He still overpowers every hero not named All Might, and both times All Might defeats him, it comes at a huge cost: the first time ravages All Might's internal organs, effectively cutting the time he can use One For All to a few short hours. The second time forces All Might to burn out the remaining embers of One For All, permanently ending his crime-fighting career. When he's nearly incinerated by Endeavor's firepower, he counters the damage by using a variant of Eri's Rewind quirk to undo his injuries, resulting in his body getting rewound years before he was ever handicapped.
  • Hated by All: Nearly everybody speaks of him with either fear, loathing, or both despite All For One claiming to have what he calls friends who will help him (read as: terrified lackeys he coerces into helping him). Even his protégé Shigaraki ends up hating him for stealing his body and trying to merge their consciousnesses without his consent. Although in that case, Shigaraki mostly Hates Everyone Equally aside from the League and Aizawa, and likely fostered resentment for his adoptive father all along deep inside for what he put him through. He later reveals to Hawks that he wants to be this, as he considers villains to be those who are universally hated and feared by everybody for their villainous deeds, and thus he goes out of his way to commit as many of these as possible and revels in the animosity he inspires in others. His ultimate end goal, every since he was a child, has been to commit the ultimate villainous act of 'thwarting the future of the whole world', so that everybody will recognize him as a hateful villain. There are only three exceptions: his loyal toady Dr. Garaki, his brother, Yoichi, and Gigantomachia. And eventually, his abusive treatment towards Machia, using him as a tool and abandoning him the second it benefitted him, sours even that, leading to the previously mindlessly-loyal giant turning on him in righteous anger when he expects his aid.
  • Having a Blast: After getting hit by Tokoyami’s Abysall Black Body: Light of Baldur, he uses an unnamed explosion quirk just like Bakugo to create a giant blast powerful enough to stagger Dark Shadow, and break free.
  • Healing Factor: At some point, he managed to acquire a healing Quirk, but by that time, it was useless for restoring his body from the damage All Might inflicted on him. It is the signature Quirk of the League's Nomus. During the final battle, Endeavor notes that he doesn't have a Hyper Regeneration Quirk (having given it to Shigaraki), or any regeneration Quirk, for that matter, as their attacks are able to damage him and it will stick. However, he reveals that he'd prepared a trump card of Eri's Rewind quirk synthesised by Garaki from the Quirk-destorying bullets to counter this. He only activates it at the exact moment he's hit with a fatal attack, because once active, it can't be stopped and will eventually kill him, but with the Rewind active, he's restored to his physical prime of health and further injuries inflicted upon him heal in seconds, shown by a slice Hawks leaves on his restored face vanishing instantly, thus leaving the heroes no choice but to wait for the Hour of Power to eventually erase him.
  • Hero Killer: He and his followers have become infamous for killing any heroes who try to stop them. When he starts taking the field in the latter parts of the story, at least one known hero meets their end at his hands. This is especially true of the holders of One For All: before All Might defeated him in their battle, he personally killed six of the seven wielders as soon as they had passed it on. Only Hikage Shinomori, the fourth user, managed to evade him long enough to die of premature aging.
  • Heroic Sacrifice: Inverted, as he pulls this off without actually intending to really sacrifice anything of value to himself, despite summoning the spirit of the trope from his past experience with heroes, making it come off as a mocking jab at heroes for their illogical fantasy of 'saving' people through their sacrifice.
    • The first time, he rescues Tomura and the league from their certain capture at Kamino ward, gives Tomura words of encouragement to motivate him to move past his defeat and grow into a better villain and then stays behind to hold off All Might whilst the league escapes through Kurogiri's portal, the framing of All For One's actions making it seem like All Might is the villain and himself pulling an Obi-Wan Moment to ensure his protégé survives, even at the cost of getting thrown into Tartarus for life. However, this is later revealed to be a mere falsehood. All For One only rescued Tomura so he could later inherit his original Quirk, allowing his vestige to possess him and effectively allowing All For One to be 'reborn' within Tomura's body as the 'Next Me', meaning that his actions were not to protect Tomura, but rather, himself.
    • When Endeavor incinerates his original body to the point of nearly dying, he again mocks them for thinking he cared about his old broken shell when he now lives on through his ideal self in Tomura, but nonetheless uses the opportunity to test out Eri's rewind quirk despite the dangers of mishandling it, comparing it to the heroes' own efforts in risking their lives and sacrificing their bodies to achieve victory, even though All For One isn't really sacrificing anything he values.
      All For One: Heroes don't have a monopoly on big sacrificial moments, you know?
  • Hidden Depths: He is remarkably familiar with One For All's mental world, and isn't the least bit surprised when the previous users appear. He explains that his Quirk allows him to interact with the vestiges of its victims, and confesses to feeling unease when their specters confront him. It is clear, however, that he feels no real guilt for it.
  • Hidden Eyes:
    • In Midoriya's vision, his eyes were always twisted or blurred and his full face is never revealed. This is inverted with Vol.0 chapter, where his eyes are the only visible part of his face when he fights Nana. Season 5 of the anime reveals that his eyes were originally red. His right eye regrows from the charred husk of his burned face as part of a Wham Shot when he reveals he'd managed to access a variant of Eri's Rewind quirk, using her power to restore the injuries he'd suffered, past and present.
    • This gets Inverted to chilling effect when he's utterly pissed and still possesses his oculars, as his face becomes covered in shadows except for his eyes, showing only a stoic Death Glare that nonetheless emphasises how seething he is underneath his external composure, communicating his clear malice through his natural soulless gaze.
  • Hidden Villain: He first appears talking through a computer screen up until later in the story, so for the first part, the audience won't know who he is, what he looks like, etc. just that he's plotting something with Shigaraki as his direct underling. His face shows up after the conflict with Stain, but he maintains himself Shrouded in Myth even then.
  • His Own Worst Enemy: It's made repeatedly clear throughout the story's final arcs that All For One's effectiveness as a villain is severely hampered by his own sheer hubris. Nearly all of his plans fall apart because All For One is so arrogant that he repeatedly underestimates his opponents and never factors in the possibility that he could actually lose.
  • History Repeats:
    • All For One is only known to have permanently meshed together multiple Quirks to form a new one twice: once accidentally making One For All and creating Warp Gate. This ends up blowing up in his face both times, as Monoma copies Warp Gate as part of the plan to finally bring him down, something only possible because it counts as a single Quirk.
    • During his original body's Last Stand at Kamino Ward, he faces down the Lightning Bruiser All Might, who is mainly supported by his cape-wearing ally Gran Torino, whose power disparity against All For One turns him into a Fragile Speedster who can only provide moral support and try to stop All Might falling for his psychological mind games, even as the hero is enraged to a degree never seen before by All For One's vindictiveness, and part of All For One's attempted Finishing Move on him was to combine 13 quirks within his right arm, turning it into a gigantic, vaguely hand-shaped amalgamation to mimic All Might's signature 'Smash' attacks. During the Final Battle, he wipes out all of Izuku's allies but the cape-wearing Miro Togata, whose intangibility protects him from TomurAFO's immense strength, but is otherwise powerless to hurt him, and instead likewise provides Izuku moral and mental support in facing down TomurAFO and distracting him during crucial moments. Thanks to Tomura's Adaptive Ability, his left arm transforms into a gigantic fleshy hand-shaped amalgamation made up of the bodies of Tenko's family, capable of unleashing 'Smash' attacks comparable to All Might's. Both these forms are defeated in swift order by his respective opponent controlling and instead channeling their anger into an unorthodox attack that deals him a massive blow beyond what any other fighter could unleash.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard:
    • In the lead-up to the Final Battle, he goes to extensive lengths to ensure Izuku is not only under-prepared to face him before he's mastered his powers, but also a wreck in mind and body, isolated from all his allies whilst All For One conversely intends to face him once he's perfected his mental fusion with Tomura and gained full control over his extensive stockpiled quirks in a body powerful enough to handle them, additionally planning to mob Izuku with every available villain ally at once just for good measure. Due to a combination of factors, primarily his own self-centred nature coming back to bite him on multiple occasions, this exact scenario ends up occurring to him instead, leaving him on the losing side of the fight and bitterly complaining about how 'unfair' it is.
    • His grooming of Shigaraki backfires spectacularly when his Grand Theft Me spurs Shigaraki on to take control of himself back little by little. His vestige is left screaming in rage and desparation over his lack of control before Shigaraki literally explodes out from inside him, becoming the sole user of the original Quirk and making it impossible for All For One to ever steal back One For All.
    • He sent Lady Nagant to attack Izuku, knowing that she would fail and then he could just kill her to cause another moral blow to him. Instead, Lady Nagant survives, and Izuku's intervention restores her faith in true heroism - allowing her to provide support for Izuku at a critical point in the Final Battle.
    • The intensity of his battle with Endeavor contributed to creating a massive storm over Japan. This ends up powering up Inasa and Tokoyami during the Final Battle, making both a much larger threat to than they already would be.
    • He intentionally turned Gigantomachia into a mindless force of destruction that would unthinkingly follow only his commands alone, without regard for himself. This same Blind Obedience meant that Machia would easily fall prey to Shinso's Conditional Powers when he spoke in All For One's voice, allowing All For One to be attacked by the very force he groomed to serve his interest because of that same mindlessness. His abandoning of Machia and leaving him to rot in hero custody also comes back to bite him hard, as it turns out Machia's Blind Obedience has its limits and that abandonment causes him to turn on All For One at the worst possible moment.
    • He indirectly manipulated Stain's charisma and appeal to the masses in order to make the League of Villains seem more legitimate and attract noteworthy villains to ally under their banner, after the initial loss at UA. This corruption of his "crusade" to spread rampant villainy across Japan and undermine faith in heroes motivated Stain to dedicate himself to undermining All For One's plans, stepping in a crucial points to ensure the heroes could properly combat him.
  • Hope Crusher:
    • He absolutely revels in destroying others' hopes and idealism about the world, at times seeming ecstatic at the chance to mentally destroy Izuku both for the sake of his plans and just because he is that unbelievably spiteful towards what he sees as an illogical delusion that has no place in reality. Contrastingly, Aoyama points out to him that such views and the resistance against his rule that they inspire are the one thing he fears and abhors above all, which is why he demonstrates anger towards All Might whenever he's thwarted by those who were inspired to be heroes by his example.
      Aoyama: You fear the world learning that Japan isn't finished yet, and you fear Japan inspiring the world to unite once more. So today is the day, and this is the place where you fall!
    • He later espouses his opinion to Hawks that being this is the epitome of what defines a Villain, which is why he goes out of his way to invoke this with everybody he interacts with in ways large and small, punctuated by him stealing a nearby hero's quirk, as well as her hopes of a future using her abilities to protect others, almost causally as an afterthought, despite acknowledging that he's soon going to die and take her powers with him before he could make practical use of them. He even reveals that his grand goal that he's been aiming to achieve through his villainous plans since childhood, is to successfully destroy the world's hope through his oppressive rule over all, just so that he'll be seen by all as a universally reviled and feared villain in a class of his own.
      All For One: It's simple. I'm quite influenced by comics. The world always fears the big bad villain. Why do you think that is?...In a world teeming with myriad cultures and values, "bad stuff" would be an act that universally makes the masses turn up their noses in disgust. An act that thwarts the future they envision. So I intend to thwart the future of the whole world. That's all I've ever wished for.
    • This is Deconstructed, as it seems he has a pathological need to crush the hopes of people in general, but especially those who have actually bruised his ego or he hates for one reason or another, letting his sense of pragmatism faulter in the process. Once the heroes pick up on this tendency, they exploit it by having the bait for their trap being a chance to completely crush Deku in the most unfair way possible, and he furthermore winds up wasting valuable time from his Hour of Power trying to force the heroes who humiliated him to recognise the hopelessness of facing the "Demon Lord". Even when he eventually succeeds in beating the heroes down, Hawks and Mineta's defiance towards him visibly tempts him into trying to continue to break their wills before he reluctantly concludes that he needs to spend his remaining time wisely. Despite that, he still contents himself that the news footage of their defeat will break the spirits of the watching civilians, again showing his pathological dependancy on breaking others to sooth his bruised ego from the humiliation he's endured. All Might even counts on this to pull a Deliberate Injury Gambit against him, aware that if All For One ambushes him, he wouldn't go for an immediately fatal attack to the head when he could painfully injure All Might and savour his agonised expression on his face instead. When All For One breaks All Might's legs and strips him of most of his Powered Armour, leaving him prone and helpless on the ground as he flies above him, he literally hands his nemesis a final opportunity to damage him with his final support item by bringing the prone hero in front of Izuku so he can mentally break him.
  • Humanoid Abomination: Having survived what should've been certain death, combined with his Quirk-enhanced lifespan, severe case of Facial Horror, and rampant psychopathy, All For One seems to have devolved into something less than human. Many shots frame him as some sort of Eldritch Abomination akin to Slender Man, standing head and shoulders above other characters with a stooping, hunched gait, or sprouting out of Shigaraki in the vestige world like a horror movie creature. It's so bad that even Hawks is able to sense something truly vile is happening inside All For One's copy of his own Quirk, where he's shown eating the vestiges of those rebelling against him. So many years of using his Power Parasite powers seem to have turned him into something of a parasite himself, latching onto whatever he can find in his quest to consume everything, living up to the name "All For One."
  • Humiliation Conga: Subjected to this during most of Final Act. Every last one of All For One's schemes goes utterly, hilariously wrong, to the point he's frequently screaming his head off, ranting and raving about how unfair it is and coming off as a Sore Loser. His plan to capture Midoriya fails thanks to his friends convincing him to return to U.A. His battle against Star and Stripe ends with a good number of his Quirks destroyed and Shigaraki's completion delayed by a week. His plan to use Aoyama to lure Midoriya away from U.A. results in him being Lured into a Trap instead. Prime All For One gets barbecued by Endeavor and is forced to use Eri's Rewind Quirk to survive, and it's slowly rewinding him out of existence. The vestige of All For One inside Shigaraki is subjected to a Curb-Stomp Battle by Midoriya, damaging Shigaraki's body enough that Shigaraki is able to desstroy the vestige and retake control of his body for good.
  • Hunk: When he rewinds further to his prime in Chapter 363, he is revealed to have a chiseled jaw and refined, almost beatific looks that complements his tall height and muscular physique. However, even with his good looks, his regenerated dead eyes underscore the monster that hides beneath his mask of humanity.
  • Hypocrite:
    • During his fight with Endeavor, he tries to get under his skin by bringing up his abuse of his children, lambasting him for forcing Shoto to clean up his mess by having him battle Dabi. While he isn't entirely wrong, those words ring hollow coming from a man who himself groomed a little boy for the express purpose of turning him into his new vessel for his Quirk and Vestige. Hawks' mental narration makes it clear that All for One doesn't actually give a damn about being right or having any kind of moral superiority over Endeavor, he just wants to use whatever advantages he can to unsettle his opponent and regain control of the fight and his situation.
    • When he's losing the fight against Izuku, he starts childishly complaining about how 'unfair' the situation is, that the heroes are pulling dirty tricks to weaken him and prevent him displaying the full might of Tomura's body, controlling how the fight goes thanks to their divide-and-conquer scheme no matter how hard he tries to break free. This, despite him having devoted every second after breaking free from Tartarus pulling every possible dirty trick and psychological gambit against Izuku to ensure he was in as poor a state as possible for their 'rematch', goading him to isolate himself from his allies and showing up to fight him with every assembled resource he had, showing how badly he takes the concept of him losing.
    • He denied Yoichi's statement that a hero would inevitably rise to defeat the "Demon Lord" he modelled himself after using his abilities, claiming that just because fantastical superpowers were now a part of reality, it didn't mean that reality would follow the rules of a comic book. Yet his ranting throughout the Final Battle indicates that he applied the exact same logic to the "Demon Lord", genuinely believing that he was likewise invincible by becoming the character in actuality. Needless to say, as the fighting goes on, his own words come back to haunt him repeatedly.

    I-K 
  • I Control My Minions Through...: In the past, All For One was shown to control his minions by giving them Quirks, thus indebting them to him. However, he's also shown a talent for manipulating people frustrated with hero society through their philosophical ideals, such as feeding Shigaraki those ideals and using them to groom him or appealing to Lady Nagant's cynicism to convince her to work for him. Part of what makes him such a Manipulative Bastard is that whatever the reason for those people's convictions, he's convincing them to fight to tear down one of the only things keeping him from turning Japan into his own personal dictatorship.
  • Inferiority Superiority Complex: All For One has a gigantic ego and always seems confident and composed. However, the final arc reveals underneath it, he has a fundamental need to constantly be in control, and his inner speech consists mostly of frantically trying to reassure himself he still is, and the heroes' plans don't matter. The one thing that can well and truly get to him is being shown he's Not So Invincible After All, which may in part be because a large portion of his motivation comes from the manga he and Yoichi read as a kid always ended with the heroes winning and the idea Yoichi was right is something All For One can't stand.
  • Instantly Proven Wrong:
    • When he learns he's been lured into a trap, he frantically tries to reassure himself his back up plans will succeed and render the heroes' plans mute...and is instantly proven wrong multiple times in a row as the heroes reveal they already planned for his back ups.
    • During the Final Battle, he mocks the heroes for trying to fight him without Endeavor (who's fighting Dabi), who he considers the only hero that could actually pose a threat to him at this point. Cue Tokoyami appearing behind him after exploiting the storm formed from the massive clashes and having Pixie-Bob bury him in earth to power Dark Shadow up until its Kaiju-sized and smashing him into the ground. Turns out Tokoyami went to fight All For One precisely because Dark Shadow being generated by his Quirk means he can No-Sell All For One's Quirk stealing.
  • I Was Quite a Looker: Before he was horribly disfigured by All Might. All For One used to look like a clean-shaven man in his late 20s, having an imposing build (if not outright muscular), chiseled facial features, and a mop of white hair. His red eyes are still shrouded in shadows. His lost looks start growing back when he uses Eri's Rewind quirk to counter the burn damage from Endeavor's flames and rewind into his prime, revealing his chiseled jaw and angelic facial features, looking almost like a textbook example of a hero, befitting his desire to become the 'savior' for humanity... as its overlord and ruler.
  • Immortals Fear Death: In the 'not quite immortal but powerful' category, All For One has lived for over a hundred years and is nigh unkillable, but the only time he's ever displayed genuine fear is when Endeavor is on the verge of killing him and most of his planning revolves around 'upgrading' from his crippled, aging body to a young, fresh one. Of note, even in his 'expendable' old body, he only resorts to using his copy of Eri's 'Rewind,' a potentially fatal gambit he doesn't expect to survive, when he's already fatally wounded and going to die anyway. Even then, it turns out he plans to inject his copied Quirk factor into Tomura to have the two merge into a stronger vestige within, effectively still cheating his original self's death. His mental references to his near-fatal defeat at All Might's hands and how 'wounded heroes are the scariest' throughout fights when he's struggling to put his opponents down imply that he gained a massive trauma from the one time his accumulated powers, abilities and plans failed to prevent him from almost dying after centuries of being an unbeatable 'Demon Lord' and how he's ultimately Not So Invincible After All.
  • Immortality Seeker: While he as already extended his life for two centuries, All For One wants to find a way to live on forever as part of his dream of being an eternal Demon King. Part of why he funded Dr. Garaki's experiments is to make that fantasy a reality.
  • Instant-Win Condition: A non-videogame example, but fitting with his underlying Psychopathic Manchild personality, it's shown that All For One has a bad habit of assuming this in battle from a combination of his particular powers and experience with past heroes, which tends to make him lower his guard.
    • His ability to steal Quirks with a touch means that him doing so almost automatically guarantees his victory against his now-helpless opponent, taking their strength away and adding it to his own almighty powers. This turtledoves with his obsession with stealing Quirks first before killing his enemies, especially if they catch his fancy. When he did this to Star and Stripe, it instead allowed her the opportunity to attack him from within with her stolen Quirk, and it's also demonstrated that he's sub-par in hand-to-hand combat because he can win with a single touch.
    • His certainty in his victory as the "Demon Lord" meant he let his guard down against All Might when he inflicted his Game-Breaking Injury on him, leading to his own crippling and disfiguration when All Might pushed through the pain to nearly kill him despite the wound.
    • As the situation continues to get worse and worse for him throughout the Final Battle, his inability to adapt to the changing circumstances or accept that he's losing control of events has his thinking eventually limited to 'Have the Next Me steal One For All' as his only way of achieving victory against the heroes, especially once he starts Living on Borrowed Time. This allows them to steadily corner him by resolving the battles against the assembled villains on his side before ganging up on him and pressuring him with numbers, as he keeps trying to flee them and reach Izuku and Tomura.
  • Invincible Villain:
    • All For One has proven to be practically unstoppable. Until the very end of the series, nothing has been able to inflict lasting damage to him or his schemes. Even in his crippled state, All For One is such a menace, that any hero who rises against him is instantly defeated, regardless of their strength or skill. Indeed, his first true loss in the series comes at the cost of the strongest hero in the world, whose quirk was an outright Reality Warper, having to pull a Heroic Sacrifice to stop him, and even then, the method she used to beat him relied upon indirectly weakening him rather that outright overwhelming him with her quirk, because the enhancements he'd made to Tomura's body meant that not even pulling a direct hit with a [WMD] was enough to stop him. In his rewound state, not only is he stronger than ever and lacking the Achilles' Heel they were relying on to defeat him, but the Rewind energy also undoes any damage inflicted on him as well, even resurrecting him from being smashed into pieces at once point, meaning he cannot be physically defeated anymore. The only downside is that the same energy will eventually cause Death by De-aging, but until then, the heroes can only endure his attacks one-sidedly.
    • As his rants against the heroes illustrate, he perceived the Demon Lord figure from his childhood comic books as being this, to the point of actually stopping before the point the narrative depicted his inevitable failure out of blind rejection for that outcome. It transpires that he sincerely believes that by modeling himself after said figure and planning accordingly to avoid the pitfalls that undid him, he will likewise be utterly unstoppable and unbeatable no matter what and will never actually lose. Needless to this, getting faced with the fact that such a figure can't exist in reality is something that constantly infuriates him.
  • I Reject Your Reality:
    • In Chapter 333 All For One thinks back to the discussions he had with Yoichi about the comics they would read together and how the hero would always triumph in the end. All For One states that, contrary to what Yoichi thought, he was aware of how the stories ended, he just chose to stop reading at that point because he didn't like the outcome.
    • This tendency shows up during the Final Battle. As the heroes manage to completely outsmart him, all his internal dialog is devoted to frantically trying to convince himself he's still in control and not losing. Even his boast that his original body is expendable comes across less as the truth and more trying to reassure himself the heroes killing him didn't count, as he was trying to convince Endeavor not to roast him a few seconds earlier. His response to Hawks reminding him Endeavor actually beat him is simply to call it 'splitting hairs.' At his core, All For One is such a narcissist that he'll make any excuse or argument to avoid admitting he's suffered an actual loss.
    • This refusal to face the reality of his gradual loss and the failure of his centuries-long schemes gets more pronounced as Rewind starts affecting his mentality as he steadily gets younger, his denials becoming more childish as they become increasingly blatantly wrong. He denies that All Might's last-effort plan to bait him into wasting the remaining minutes of his Hour of Power left in a pointless fight with him is working whilst he's fighting him, trying to claim he can easily kill a Quirkless man like him with his immense power whilst said "powerless" man is using a suit of Powered Armour to skilfully beat him down regardless.
  • Ironic Echo: All For One ends up borrowing significant lines from two of the main heroes and delivering twisted variations on them.
    • At the start of the series, Midoriya declares that this is the story of how he became the world's greatest hero. When All For One uses Tomura Shigaraki to recover his original body from Tartarus, he declares that this is the story of how he became the perfect demon lord. It's like he's trying to usurp him as the main character, which befits his monstrous ego.
    • After All Might defeats All For One in Kamino, he says, "You're next!", which sounds like a warning to the other villains, but is actually a way of telling Midoriya that he's no longer the Symbol of Peace, and it's now Midoriya's turn to step up. In Chapter 316, All For One leaves a recording for Midoriya declaring that he has no interest in All Might and has moved onto Midoriya before concluding the recording with the same phrase. Given that he ended chapter 94 with his own version of the same phrase, apparently directed at only Tomura to pick up where he left off, his repetition of the same words implies that he was also referring to Izuku as his next target when he said it with All Might having then been eliminated as a threat to his plans. He also admits he couldn't stop thinking about Izuku whilst in prison, and the paneling at the end of 94 prominently features Izuku alongside Tomura in focus when he says it.
  • Irony:
    • Hawks theorizes that AFO's psychopathic nature prevents him from taking and subjugating One For All. Despite the generations-long history of animosity between AFO and the wielders, he himself cannot care strongly enough to steal the Quirk that opposes him due to his inability to emotionally grow as a person. Furthermore, the Final Battle has All For One utterly checkmated at every point, with the situation only turning in his favor once again by the willpower and efforts of the younger villains on his side, which he gleefully lampshades, stating that he places more faith in a person's emotions than anything else, despite lacking deep emotions himself.
    • He prides himself on being The Chessmaster, with even setbacks factoring into his plan and his 'friends' being puppets serving his whims. The Final Battle sees him placed in a situation where he has no control over any of his 'friends' at all. This means he effectively has no say in the rest of the Paranormal Liberation Front's battles with the heroes.
    • At the end of the prequel series Vigilantes, he begrudgingly marvels at Koichi's rapid improvements with his Quirk despite starting as a complete average nobody and accepts that so long as the right conditions are met, any random citizen can be inspired to do a heroic act and, eventually, become a "superman." Izuku is an average high school student who was physically unsuited to using One For All. But he still managed to become its final holder and All For One's next archenemy. All because he did perform that heroic act and proved to All Might he was worthy of being his successor.
    • He is the overarching Big Bad of the series and its related spinoffs. He clearly sees himself as destined to triumph over Izuku as the current receptacle of his brother's quirk. Yet by the time of the Final Battle, his plans are almost completely waylaid due to the efforts of heroes he considered to be mere side characters.
    • He put his plan to become a 'more perfect Demon Lord' through Tomura into motion in part because he was dissatisfied with his old body's unhealable crippling injuries that prevented him from ever recovering from them. He additionally desired to live beyond his natural lifespan, being so unwilling to accept his mortality that he actually begged Endeavour to stop when he was about to be killed. Yet he staved off his immediate passing by using Eri's Rewind energy to undo the damage, additionally rejuvenating him back to his physical prime. In effect, he only regained his former strength by embracing death.
    • He goes to exhaustive effort to prepare to fight Izuku as his 'final' opponent of One For All, supremely confident in his victory against such an inexperienced opponent, pulling every dirty trick in the book to prepare for his final fight with Izuku. Attempting to steal One For All immediately whilst Izuku's unable to fully control his Combo Platter Powers, using pawns and catpaws to isolate Izuku from any allies or civilian supporters, etc. Yet in the run-up to this, his attempt to steal one for all actually strengthened Izuku's connection to the vestiges, who support him in mastering his Combo Platter Powers to new heights of strength and utility in a fight, his attempt to steal more power from Star and Stripe resulted in the destruction of a good number of Tomura's quirks and damage to his 'vessel', and the heroes spring a trap on him that uses Kurogiri's warping quirk to forcibly separate his original and vestige self. When his vestige finally fights Izuku, he doesn't even get the privilege of using his full strength with his Quirks deactivated. He wanted his fight with Izuku to be as one-sided as possible, and he wound up on the receiving side of that, which he throws a childish tantrum over.
  • It's All About Me: His Quirk name says it all. In keeping with his narcissism, he hates All Might for defeating his previous gang of villains — not because he viewed them as comrades — but because he gave them their powers and it reflected poorly on him. Not even Tomura or Gigantomachia are exceptions to All For One's egomania. This shows in his 'bonds' with his brother and Tomura: while he claims to care about them, said 'care' is twisted and self-serving, more based around what they can do for him or having them almost as possessions rather than actually having any genuine compassion. More literal in Tomura's case, as All For One intends him to be the vessel for his Quirk and the vestige inside of it, and thus views him as little more than an extension of himself.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: His adoption and wholehearted support of Tomura, a.k.a. Tenko Shimura, at first seems like the only genuinely kind deed (other than giving Yoichi a Quirk to make him more powerful) he's ever done. Some people even thought of it as a heartwarming, if twisted, father/son relationship. In the end, he didn't save Tomura because he cared whatsoever. He just did it because he knew of the child's heritage, and manipulated Tomura into being dependent on him. All to reveal that his right-hand man is the grandson of All Might's mentor turned to villainy, and emotionally shatter the Symbol of Peace. Don't let the below quote fool you; in later chapters he's perfectly fine with hijacking Tomura's body and using him like a puppet against the heroes and to break his real body out of prison. Yoichi speculates that All For One groomed Tomura as a tool to capture One For All.
    All For One: No one's come to save you, have they? You've had a hard life, Tenko Shimura. "He'll be fine, eventually the heroes will help." I'm sure that's what everyone thought as they looked away and ignored you. The world shouldn't be so unforgiving, don't worry... I am here for you.
  • Join or Die: A variant. In the past, All For One managed to rule over Japan by giving Quirks to those who didn't have any and stealing Quirks from those who either didn't want them or were using them to abuse others. This earned him a legion of loyal followers whose gratitude soon turned to extreme fanaticism to the point that they killed a group of people who refused to join his faction even though he didn't order them to. Of course, he was quite happy with that.
  • Kick the Dog:
    • Has committed so many examples of this through the series and for decades before the story started that it could take up an entirely separate page, and once he gets out of Tartarus and starts taking direct action against Izuku for his endgame, he wastes no time racking these moments up one after another non-stop, all for the purposes of breaking the young hero's spirit and making it easier for him to achieve his overall goal of stealing One For All— and also because he finds it incredibly fun to do so as well.
    • A retroactive example is revealed to be laid at his feet over the course of Vigilantes. He's revealed to be the Greater-Scope Villain of the spin-off, responsible for Iwao Oguro, AKA the Hero O'Clock, having to retire after he brutally beat him and stole his Quirk during O'Clock's investigation of one of his many underground labs. He furthermore had Oguro's daughter and wife targeted as the host for his Bee Parasite creature, leaving the latter an Empty Shell, the former his front-line agent for inflicting suffering on innocents through his trigger experimentation, and both physically maimed from their ordeal. Furthermore, he passed O'Clock's Quirk onto his next agent, No:6, a Loony Fan of the former hero who intentionally patterned himself after him as a bastardisation of his heroic legacy. Whilst these actions are consistent with the lengths he went through to torment All Might, and Oguro certainly considers him his Arch-Enemy, it's made clear that All For One didn't even really care about O'Clock at all. He was simply a random hero he crossed paths with whose circumstances allowed All For One to torment him as much for his idle amusement whilst his long-term plans were underway, rather than any specific animosity held towards him. O'Clock was nothing special to him, he's simply willing to devote that much effort towards anybody just to ensure everybody hates his guts as much as possible.
  • Killing Intent: When he's a fight, he radiates an aura of sheer menace so strong that Izuku and the other kids nearly vomited from sheer fear just by being nearby him at Kamino, even though he was unaware of their presence. His malicious intent leaves Jiro shaking badly after Hawks pushes her out the way of his attacks against her, noting that he attacked so fast that her body only started reacting to his desire to kill her after the attack had missed, leaving her cowed at the threat that had been targeting her classmates.
  • Knight of Cerebus: He is the mastermind behind the League of Villains, mentoring the leader of said group, and he is the personal enemy of All Might. When he finally steps in to fight, he takes out several heroes in mere seconds. His actions continue to haunt the heroes of the world even in the present day. While Stain and Chisaki also made the story much darker upon their entrance, All For One's arrival is the point where the series really goes from a somewhat lighthearted (but not without danger) Academy of Adventure series to constant life-or-death situations against people hell-bent on destroying society as we know it.

    L-N 
  • Lack of Empathy:
    • Whatever praise or concern he shows for others is only a false front, because ultimately, All For One sees his followers as a means to an end and is utterly devoid of compassion. All For One actually views guilt and other such emotions as signs of inferiority, and was actually concerned when he first started encountering the vestiges of those whose quirks he'd stolen, thinking it was a sign that he was showing remorse for what he'd done, disturbed that he might actually be capable of feeling such 'lesser' emotions, and relieved when Gakurai identified the true cause.
      All For One: In my dreams, those whose quirks I've stolen show up to hurl abuse my way. These episodes often leave me discouraged. Am I really capable of feeling guilt for my sins like some utterly ordinary person?
    • This shows with Tomura in specifically, as it's Double Subverted. While at first he seems to care about him, it's eventually revealed Tomura was never more than a vessel to become his 'Next Me' and he's fundamentally incapable of seeing Tomura as a seperate being. IE, any care he shows Tomura is only caring about himself.
  • Large and in Charge: All For One stands at a whopping 7 feet 4 inches tall, making him one inch taller than All Might.
  • Large Ham: Starts screaming his head off into a tirade of insults against Deku when his younger brother openly defies him in the vestige world.
  • Laser-Guided Karma:
    • All of the discord he's sown over the years, all of the previous One For All users he fought and killed, all of the torment he put the heroes and especially class 1-A through, every bad thing he's done in his life comes back to bite him during the Final Battle. While All For One had spent well over a century scheming, building up to when he could finally steal One For All, he shows too much of his hand at the very end at an exact point where all of his enemies are banded together, ready and united to face him. Each of his plans start going spectacularly wrong, with All For One left confused as to how everything has come together to work specifically against him. This despite Yoichi's constant warnings he was barreling down a doomed path where the Demon Lord will always lose.
    • He dismisses Yoichi's warnings about his inevitable loss down the line because, despite living in a world of superpowers, reality didn't actually follow the rules of a comic book, thus he arrogantly believed there was no guarantee anybody could overcome his sheer power. However, during the Final Battle it transpires that he actually applied this same logic to the "Demon Lord" character, believing he'd become invincible by modelling himself after the character in actuality and learning from the mistakes that brought him down. As his losses continue to mount throughout the fighting, it only highlights how correct All For One's spiteful retort was, to his detriment.
    • He abandoned most of the League, including Gigantomachia, to be captured by the heroes. Turns out, Machia took being abandoned despite of his Undying Loyalty personally and when he's freed, the giant ends up turning on All For One.
    • He dedicated himself to creating a reign of never-ending fear and oppression over the people to become recognised as the supreme villain above all others, yet it was precisely to save people from living under such conditions that a young Yagi Toshinori dedicated himself to becoming the Symbol of Peace, to give people faith in a better tomorrow. This resulted in him becoming the hero that would undo all of All For One's decades of effort and physically maimed him to the point he was unable to achieve his grand ambitions with his original self anymore.
    • He indirectly manipulated Stain's false hero crusade to give the League of Villains a popularity boost, which had a knock-on effect of spreading a rise of rampant chaotic villainy as heroes became stretched too thin to deal with the ongoing crisis, as per his master plan and the exact opposite message Stain actually wanted to spend. This motivated Stain to similarly indirectly undermine All For One's plans in important ways, becoming the single biggest Spanner in the Works against him. He provided the Tartarus security data to the heroes when nobody else could have salvaged it, giving them invaluable insight into All For One's actual plans to better counteract him, and also providing audio recordings for Shinso to control Machia in his voice. He snapped All Might out of his depression over his inability to directly aid others as a hero anymore, which was another objective All For one wanted to achieve, and lead to All Might directly opposing All For One when all other heroes had failed to stop him. Finally, when All Might was on the verge of losing, he stepped in to save him when no backup the heroes had could have made it, with All For One's situation making his Quirk the worst one that could be used against him.
  • Last Villain Stand: The Final Battle eventually turns into this for him: all of his plans are in ruins, his Vestige inside Shigaraki is destroyed, all of his minions are defeated, defected, or never actually loyal to him in the first place, and All For One himself mortally wounded and living on borrowed time. All he can do is flail wildly at the heroes trying to pin him down, unable to accept his ultimate plan has been ruined no matter what he does.
  • Leitmotif:
  • Let No Crisis Go to Waste: Deliberately invoked and purely for his own benefit, as All For One takes advantage of chaos he causes or caused by others to advance his goals. It's taken to such extremes it's revealed All For One's ultimate goal is to become an invincible "Demon Lord" out of the comics he read so that everybody has no choice but to turn to his stockpile of Quirks in place of the resources they lost thanks to him. This would ensure absolute control. He just needs One For All to make his maniacal dream a permanent reality.
  • Light 'em Up: He posses a Quirk that allows him to shoot a laser from his hand. By pouring his rage into it, he’s able to defeat both Gigantomachia, and a super charged Dark Shadow with one shot each; though the backlash tore his body apart to the point, he only survives thanks to Rewind healing the damage.
  • Lightning Bruiser: Casually dodged an ambush from Edge Shot, who can transform and attack at the speed of sound, simply by tilting his head. He can also match a serious All Might blow-for-blow.
  • Like a Son to Me: In a twisted sort of way. He effectively adopted a young Tenko Shimura off the street when he was scared and alone after killing his family. He raised the boy as a successor, nurturing his worst impulses and even bestowing him with his own family name on the boy as Tomura Shigaraki. While his goal was to use the boy as a tool of revenge and to gain a body powerful enough to use his Quirk to its full potential, he seems content to accept Tomura rebelling against him as long as Tomura’s goals remain the destruction of superhero society. Ultimately subverted, however, as All For One doesn't care about Shigaraki and instead sees him as 'the next me' and an extension of himself.
  • Literal Metaphor: The manga's themes of succession and passing one's hopes and dreams onto the next generation is often referred to as an 'inherited will', best symbolised by One For All being Yoichi's inherited will to defeat his brother long past his mortal lifespan. As his opposite and antithesis to the manga's theme, All For One's own take on the concept is a complete bastardisation of it: By having Tomura literally inherit his will through his vestige attached to his original Quirk, planning to subsume his protege's consciousness and take over his enhanced body to become the "Perfect Demon Lord". Tomura ultimately has to destroy his vestige and symbolic desire to make the plot revolve around him to truly become his own villain desperate from his master's influence.
  • Living Lie Detector: All For One has a Quirk that allows him to sense malicious intent and use that to sense if someone is lying, which was apparently stolen from the ancestor of Naomasa Tsukauchi. However, It doesn't work on someone who has no intent in their voices at all, such as those controlled by Shinso's quirk. His usage of such implies that, for all his long years alive and skill with manipulating people over the years, All For One's psychopathy prevents him being able to acutely gauge when others are being untruthful towards him.
  • Living on Borrowed Time: After being fatally burned nearly to ashes by Endeavor, he uses Rewind to restore himself to his prime. However, he outright admits there's no way to turn it off and all he's done is delay his death for a short time.
  • Logical Weakness: As befitting a man with many Quirks, he possesses many weaknesses along with them, enough for his own folder.
  • Long-Lived: Midoriya's the ninth wielder of One For All. All For One was directly responsible for creating the power in the first place, and even taking into account the possibility not all the wielders lived to their prime or gained it as children, it still puts him at living for a long while. When questioned how this is possible, it's pointed out that he could have possibly stolen a Quirk that delays aging or something similar. It's later revealed that he took a copy of Dr. Garaki's Life Force Quirk, which extends his life span at the cost of athleticism. This trait of his helps turn his usage of Eri's Rewind energy into an Hour of Power, as his body is rewound back to the prime of health before the injuries All Might gave him years ago were ever inflicted in a matter of seconds, meaning the only reason he doesn't get erased near-instantly is because he has so much lifespan for the energy to rewind through.
  • Long-Range Fighter:
    • All For One does have a lot of physical power enhancing Quirks, but he seems to prefer hanging back and spamming powerful ranged attacks and rarely willingly enters melee combat with others except on specific situations. The few melee attacks we've actually seen him use are large power attacks. This helps him enact his preferred and far more devastatingly effective tactic of using psychological warfare to rattle his enemies mid-battle and make them lose focus enough to give him an opening to enact a devastating blow.
    • During the Final Battle, he implies another reason is nearly everyone who actually knows how his power works will avoid getting into melee range at all costs to avoid having their Quirks stolen. As such, by default most fights he's in will be at range. This backfires on him as it leaves him subpar in melee combat.
  • Lovecraftian Superpower: Whenever he uses his Quirks, expect copious amounts of Body Horror. A Spring-Limbs Quirk causes his arm to compress and inflate like an actual spring. His "Rivet Stab" Quirk has black and red tendrils extend from his fingers. In an attempt to finish off All Might, he uses a mass combination of Quirks to transform his entire right arm into a grotesque sight of hypertrophied flesh and tangled arms with metallic parts sticking out. A special note goes to the Spear-like Bones Quirk, which couldn't be pretty under any circumstances. He adds a new one to the list in the final battle by showing the ability to transform parts of his flesh into mouths whether it be a single finger or his whole hand; special mention also goes to him combining this with Spear-like Bones to serve as the teeth. There's also whatever Quirk he used in the battle that killed Nana Shimura, which involved massive amalgamations of random body parts.
  • Made of Iron: Superpower Lottery or not, taking All Might's United States of Smash to the face and not being crippled for it definitely counts. Even before that, he somehow survived his grievous injuries at All Might's hands — which apparently included everything above his jawline getting turned into pastewithout Hyper Regeneration, as he laments the fact that despite possessing it, it cannot fix his injuries because they'd already healed over by the time he acquired the Quirk, meaning it doesn't recognize that there's anything to fix about his appearance.
  • The Man Behind the Man: Shigaraki Tomura leads the League of Villains, and all members meet him upon joining... only a few seem to know that Shigaraki answers to All For One.
  • Manipulative Bastard:
    • A specialty of All For One's who manipulates people and events around him without ever getting directly involved. His gifting of hands to a young Tenko Shimura is perhaps his greatest work. He gifted Tenko with the hands and told him to always keep them with him so that he could never heal from the pain of losing his family. By wearing them it also helped suppress Tenko's memories of the event and aggravate them more to increase the rage in his heart and complete his Quirk. All to turn Tenko into a Symbol of Fear.
    • During the Tartarus Escapees arc, it turns out that, rather than the two months' worth of time he would apparently need to complete Tomura's vessel, the original AFO apparently told his vestige counterpart within the boy to have him ready in 38 days, just to be certain to catch the heroes off-guard when they were expecting more time, meaning by the present time he'll be ready to take OFA in 3 days. All Might notes he could have faked the data they were likely to recover from the hospital to support his false timeline. If not for Hero killer Stain recovering a recording of the radio-wave conversation monitored by the security system as the prison was being breached, the heroes would have completely fallen for his ploy.
  • Man of Kryptonite: Invoked. If All For One is aware he's going to be going up against a specific enemy or planning to face them eventually, he'll exhaustively prepare as many Quirks as possible to specifically counter them and maximise his advantages. He allows him to nullify Stain's ambush on him using a few Quirk he'd held in reserve ever since he noticed Stain escaping Tartarus on his own whilst rejecting All For One's aid. However, this same trait backfires on him initially during the Final Battle, as his limited ability to store Quirks with his injuries and hyper-focusing on Izuku meant that when he was forced to fight Endeavour instead, he didn't have enough Quirks that could properly counter the Number one hero.
  • Many Spirits Inside of One: A side effect of him stealing Quirks is that he inherits vestiges of their personalities. When he gives that Quirk to someone else, he loses those traits as well. All For One believed that property to be exclusive to him but was surprised to learn that One For All had that property as well. In contrast to One For All, it's clear that All For One actively suppresses the vestiges that come attached to the quirks he hoards through sheer willpower, leaving him in utter control over the mental world formed inside his quirk. However, even this suppression has its limits. When he faces off against Jiro in the Final Battle, her sincere efforts to fight him despite the power difference because of how he mercilessly hurt and targets those she cares about sparks a combined effort from the vestiges to hold him back, taking him off-guard that they could even do that at this point, all from the efforts of a 'nobody' like Jiro.
    All For One: The quirks I've stolen in the past... their very wills?! Impossible!! Even New Order didn't manage this! They were spurred on by this?! By the efforts of such pushovers?!
  • Maou the Demon King: All For One's one and only ambition outside of relishing his power over others is the become an 'invincible Demon King' like the one in the manga he and his brother read as kids. As such, he does everything he can to model himself as the 'Symbol of Evil' and set himself up as an Evil Overlord.
  • Mask of Sanity: While always psychopathic, for the most part All For One shows himself as calm, collected, and always in control. However, the Final Battle reveals that underneath it, he's far more unstable than he seemed. By the time of his and All Might's final fight, his sheer mania in his Villainous Breakdown has him pulling demented smiles that illustrate his sheer lunacy.
  • Meaningful Name: "All For One" is a fitting moniker for someone who steals and hoards Quirks for his own purposes, and it highlights his defining personality trait - egoism. All Might even brings up the fact that the original All For one avoided meeting Star and Stripe in a fight was a sign that he considers the term to be his real name, rather than his birth one, showing how he's embraced the identity of a real-life supervillain to the exclusion of his original civilian one.
  • Mechanically Unusual Fighter: In a world where people are limited to using only one Quirk, All For One can use several Quirks of his choice, both individually and simultaneously, without suffering from Quirk overload.
  • Memento MacGuffin: One For All is this to him because it originated from his younger brother, and it is the one Quirk that defies him. It takes a new meaning when it is revealed that Quirks carry the consciousness of its users, and that his brother is alive as a spirit within One For All. By stealing One For All, All For One could finally accomplish one of his greatest desires: making his younger brother surrender to him.
  • Mentor Archetype: He's an old guard supervillain raising up the next generation's leader, Shigaraki... except, not really.
  • Me's a Crowd:
    • He's not directly possessing Shigaraki, rather his vestige inside of his original Quirk is. As a result, there are technically two All For Ones existing at the same time. This is shown directly when the original attempts to calm down his clone after their defeat from Star and Stripe, noting that the letter is undergoing Split-Personality Merge with Tomura's psyche and as a result he can sense his counterpart shares Tomura's boundless hatred of heroes and society, despite All For One being characterized by his lack of strong emotions. It should be noted, All For One does not see the fusion of Tomura and his vestige as an independent being, rather as the same being in two bodies, as All For One is so selfish he can't comprehend anything else. When he's fatally wounded by Endeavor's flames, he gloats that he considers his damaged and weakened body expendable anyway in favour of his idealized self in Tomura, showing that he'll discard even himself in favour of his maniacal ambitions of becoming an 'invincible demon lord'. However, his old body being disposable gives him a good excuse to test out risky abilities with it, such as Eri's Rewind quirk to undo his past and present disfigurements.
    • He furthermore clarifies to Hawks that he never intended to develop the TomurAFO personality when possessing Tomura, rather, his intent was to completely destroy the boy's psyche and replace it with his own. Having underestimated Tomura's ability to resist him, he intends to inject the copied Quirk factor in his original body into Tomura's to completely subsume him for good, believing both separate versions of himself will naturally segue into one. This highlights his sheer narcissism and inability to comprehend meaningful changes in people, as said version has gone through markedly different experiences that the original All For One and been changed because of it.
  • Moral Myopia: As is fitting for someone who sees themselves as Above Good and Evil, All For One will gladly scapegoat others for any perceived flaw, while sneering at them when they challenge him. Most notably, when he spoke to his younger brother in Midoriya's subconscious, he likened his growing power to that of a supervillain from a comic book; when his brother pointed out that said supervillain was eventually defeated, All For One invoked notions of reality to maintain superiority in the conversation.
  • Morton's Fork: Even though he is captured, and it is possible to make him give back Ragdoll's Quirk, the whole point of All For One's imprisonment actually working is that he is unable to do anything, thus he cannot perform the action necessary to restore the Quirk to her. Ragdoll has no choice but to remain benched behind a desk.
  • Muscles Are Meaningful: When Eri's Rewind quirk restores him back to the prime of health before All Might crippled him, his burnt-off clothing exposes his muscular physique, showing that he was apparently quite fit and toned before his injuries. Upon touching the ground, he demonstrates that his speed is now quick enough to near-instantly rush behind a nearby hero, steal her cape and fashion a makeshift toga out of it to preserve his modesty before she even realizes he's there. Hawks, the fastest hero around, can barely keep up with him, and it's clear that at his physical prime, he's now unbeatable by anybody present.
  • Muscles Are Meaningless: Apparently, his multiple Strength Enhancer Quirks don't necessarily affect his appearance, as he can grapple with All Might despite his unintimidating businessman physique. He only gets beefier when he uses a specific "Hypertrophy" Quirk.
  • Narcissist:
    • All For One is a narcissistic psychopath who only cares about power, himself, and what people could do for him, including his adopted son. His immense desire to claim One for All, could be seen as him trying to retrieve an extension of himself that refuses to comply with his wishes.
      Shigaraki: I won't be your stinking pawn!
      All For One: Pawn? You have it all wrong, Tomura! You're so very near and dear to me. After all, you're the next me.
    • When he's almost killed by Endeavor's Prominence Burn, he gloats to the heroes that he considers his damaged, disfigured and weakened body expendable anyway. When his body is rewound back into the prime of health by Eri's Rewind quirk, he revels in both his physical health and looks.
    • The negative aspects of this trope show themselves when he faces a genuine setback or otherwise has his ego bruised. When he's genuinely outplayed in the final arc, his internal monologue consists of him frantically trying to reassure himself he's still in control. When his self-image as the invincible demon lord is finally completely shattered, All For One can't take it and goes completely berserk. A later conversation with Hawks implies even calling his original body expendable is an attempt to convince himself and the heroes killing him didn't count as an actual loss, as being told Endeavor already beat him causes him to suddenly become furious.
    • Another negative aspect is that All For One seems fundamentally incapable of realizing or acknowledging his own flaws. Even if he does acknowledge them, it's by projecting them onto someone else, usually Tomura. This bites him in the butt, as being unaware he has flaws means the heroes are free to exploit them.
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
    • Besides the whole 'creating OFA in the first place' deal, an extremely downplayed and indirect example occurs during the Paranormal Liberation War arc, wherein his hyper focus on stealing OFA from Izuku causes him to induce Tomura to relentlessly pursue him to the exclusion of everything else, regardless of the heroes attempting to pursue him or his host's own wishes. AFO's interference and putting his own agenda above Tomura's limited the damage he was capable of inflicting, saving lives in the process and allowing the heroes to somewhat coral Tomura's rampage, though obviously AFO himself didn't care about that one way or the other.
    • Summoning literally every villain on his side just to gang up on Izuku, including Tomura, Dabi, Toga, the remaining near High-End Nomus and all the assorted remaining forces of the PLF and the miscellaneous villains attracted to their cause, allowed Izuku and Aoyama to summon their own army of all active heroes in Japan to the scene, allowing them to confront all of All For One's remaining forces as a united effort, whereas beforehand their hiding in the shadows and the chaotic situation left the heroes too widespread to accurately track them down.
    • His actions allowing the heroes to learn about his Psychic Link to Tomura comes back to bite him hard. It's noted their link would give them a huge advantage fighting together, but because they know about it ahead of time, they explicitly separate him and Tomura too far for it to work.
    • His reliance on stealing the strength of others to fuel his own ambitions and desires unintentionally created his own massive weakness, as the vestiges within him are all united in their hatred of him. His massive strength is not something he created himself, and opposition from within can unexpectedly weaken him when he needs it most. This turtledoves with his monopolization of Tomura to become the "Perfect Demon Lord". Not only does Tomura himself have no interest in being used like this, All For One having intentionally groomed him to be stronger and more powerful than himself ultimately means he has no true means of stealing Tomura's strength for his own use. Despite initially suppressing Tomura's psyche because the latter wasn't expecting his master to possess him through his Quirk, Tomura's willpower stemming from his 'Origin' enabled him to retain his sense of self, slowly regain control as the fighting turns against his master, and unhesitatingly destroying All For One's vestige when he forcibly reasserted himself as the sole opponent for Midoriya.
    • Just when it seems like he's successfully broken the heroes' control over Machia, Shinso reveals that he actually hasn't been fully controlling him, and Machia is attacking out of justified anger towards his master because he could sense he was in control when 'Tomura' abandoned him, cementing the unstoppable giant as his enemy through his own abusive treatment of him.
    • All Might invokes this as a last-ditch Batman Gambit to stall All For One when he successfully defeats all the heroes delaying him from reaching Tomura, despite an immense cost. He openly exposes himself before All For One whilst Rewind has made him literally unkillable, but has also put him on a Race Against the Clock before the same power erases him. All For One has no pragmatic reasoning to target a retired and powerless civilian whilst he needs to reach Tomura before his time runs out, but the combination of his sheer hatred for All Might and his self-control getting eroded by his plans imploding, his mentality regressing and the Psychic Link with Tomura making him emotionally unhinged for the first time in his life means that even seeing All Might's ploy for what it is, All For One can't resist the urge to mangle him and gets drawn into a pointless battle despite professing that All Might's plan isn't working.
    • His exploitation of Stain and his "crusade" for his own villainous goals resulted in a massive dose of Laser-Guided Karma against him throughout the Final Battle, but most prominently, Stain's Quirk proved to be the worst possible one to be used on him once he got forced on a Race Against the Clock.
  • No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: His apparent one act of genuine kindness, giving his little brother a meta-Quirk to make him more powerful and join his side, lead to the creation of the Quirk that would cause his downfall.
  • No Full Name Given: His first name is unknown, instead going by his Quirk's name All for One and acknowledges that his last name is Shigaraki, which he also names Tomura after taking him in. All Might later theorizes that the reason All For One didn't show up to fight Star and Stripe alongside 'TomurAFO', despite their shared mental link giving them an unparalleled combat advantage, was that All For One would have recognized the term 'All For One' as his name, and thus been subject to New Order's abilities, despite that technically just being the name of his quirk, showing how he considers his 'supervillain' name his actual name, rather than a title for others to refer to him by.
  • No-Nonsense Nemesis: A Zigzagged example, wherein he plays this straight as possible as a result of his desire to be the ultimate villain, but over time, his own character flaws deconstruct his actual effectiveness at efficiently dealing with his enemies.
    • He's ruthless at dealing with his enemies, won't hesitate to kill or maim either heroes or innocent civilians as collateral, deliberately sets out to inflict has much suffering as possible to the population at large, and is utterly unrepentant for all of it. Those he has no use for will be either stripped of their powers or gruesomely disfigured both physically or mentally. His plans are so intricately laid with multiple backups that nothing the heroes do can actually derail events from proceeding as he wishes, and he proves capable of manipulating even good-natured heroes to do his bidding against their better judgement to expressly torment Izuku. Once All Might is forced to retire, it's clear nobody else can contend with the raw power he's capable of unleashing, with the prospect of his return to the narrative an ever-present threat that initially eclipsed Tomura's own gradual rise in power as the 'Symbol of Fear'.
    • However, once he does return, the narrative makes it clear that as dangerous as he is, his threat level is handicapped by his egoism and embracement of the role of a comic-book villain. When he sees Best Jeanist and the group in the Nomu factory, he gave them warning of his presence with casual small talk before blasting them away with a supercharged Air Cannon, highlighting how helpless they were against him. This allowed Best Jeanist to pull the others out of the line of fire with Fiber Master, saving their lives, and he didn't even bother fully killing the survivors after he gored a hole through the number 4 hero. Him putting his ambition over Tomura's will handicaps the Superior Successor's ability to fight against the heroes, allowing them to contend against him despite his immense power and Decay. His obsession with having One For All lead him to intentionally hold back against the inheritors of his brother's Quirk as it grew stronger over the years, at least until they'd passed it on, leading to him being rendered helpless against the 8th and 9th at the apex of its current power. And his sadistic tendencies enable the heroes to completely outwit him at the end, predicting exactly how his final attack on Izuku would occur and using that to turn the tables on all the assembled villains.
  • No One Could Survive That!: Even All Might is wondering just how he could've survived all those deadly injuries after their previous fight. Given the one image we saw of his last defeat and his scars imply All Might crushed his head, he has every reason to think that. Even in the last battle, All Might's Finishing Move only knocked him out.
  • Not Quite Flight: His Air Walk Quirk lets him levitate and move through the air but can't go higher than 20 meters. He later gives Air Walk to Lady Nagant, but is shown still floating in midair for the final battle, indicating he has another unnamed levitating Quirk as a back up.
  • "Not So Different" Remark:
    • When All Might comes to visit him in jail, he outright asks All For One why he did the things he did. All For One responds by comparing himself to All Might, saying that they both have big dreams and the power to see those dreams realized. Of course, he freely admits that while All Might wanted to be a hero, he wanted to be an all-powerful devil king. It also highlights the greatest difference between them- All Might's dream was for the sake of everybody in the world living in peace, whereas All For One's dreams were only ever about himself.
    • He remarks his younger brother is just as stubborn as he is, in spite of their diametrically opposing philosophies and worldviews.
  • Nothing Is Scarier: He showcases a sincere delight of this trope, cultivating an aura of uncertain menace targeted towards his enemies for both practicality and personal enjoyment.
    • During his introduction to the manga, All Might highlights how, even with his personal experience with him, there are many unknown variables surrounding All For One, ranging from his name, his ultimate intentions, his motivates for forcing a Quirk onto Yoichi, and how he survived his apparent fatal fight with him. As events proceed, All For One's smug certainty in his ultimate victory despite all the heroes' efforts leaves them all unsettled, even when he's imprisoned in Tartarus. Once he breaks out, he exploits this to psychologically torment Izuku, leaving a message for him that he's going to target him now to finally defeat One For All without any specifics, leading to Izuku running himself ragged trying desperately to find him whilst pushing away his allies in case All For One targets them to hurt him. During the Final Battle, he exposes with glee how his "Golden Dark Age" had everybody living in constant fear of what might be lurking in the shadows thanks to his machinations, scared of their fellow man and with his unseen presence an ever-present fear gnawing at their minds and souls.
    • However, by the time of the final battle, the negative aspects of embracing this trope so thoroughly are also highlighted. It's repeatedly made clear that underneath his Shrouded in Myth persona of the "Demon Lord", All For One doesn't really have a character of his own. Once the heroes do see through him, he proves easy to predict and outmanoeuvre because of how simple his personality is despite his immense intelligence. His reign being so shadowy and unseen by the public means that when All Might stopped him and dismantled his empire, there was practically no proof left that he ever existed. And to the current generation who are willing to stand up to him regardless of the power gap, his lack of historical presence means that none of them afford him the respect he feels the "Demon Lord" is entitled to.
  • Not So Invincible After All: The entire series presents All For One as the invincible Demon King he believes himself to be. Nigh unstoppable to anyone that's not All Might and capable of planning for everything, never suffering a meaningful defeat. The build up to the finale, however, is largely devoted to ripping that image apart. While All For One remains convinced he's inevitably going to win and his plans cannot fail, the heroes have learned his flaws and expertly exploit them to turn the tables as All For One is at a loss to understand how. This image being disproven and torn down proves to be one of the only things that can actually genuinely enrage him.
  • Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: When confronted by his younger brother, Yoichi, All For One claims that he is helping people and bringing order to society. Yoichi countered that All for One was just exploiting people for his sadistic whim, which All for One does not deny afterwards.

    O-S 
  • Obviously Evil: Everything about All For One - from his character design to his personality - is fine-tuned to accentuate why he's the Symbol of Evil and one of the most wicked characters in the series. Whilst he didn't indulge in a Super villain costume back when he was in the height of his power — instead preferring to wear either sharp suits or a Badass Longcoat ensemble — when the injuries he endured at All Might's hands forced him to wear a life-support mask into combat, he went out of his way to stylize it into a menacing black skull-like appearance, fitting with how he embraces the role of a villain with glee. He even goes out of his way to get a second similar mask ready when he appears to confront Izuku directly, despite the league having to lie low and apparently lacking a lot of resources following the Hospital raid, apparently just for the sake of appearing suitably menacing and dramatic when confronting his new 'nemesis'.
  • Oh, Crap!:
    • He has his first completely genuine, unambiguous one when he realizes that Star and Stripe put a rule in place right before he stole New Order to make it rebel against the other quirks stockpiled inside Shigaraki. His Quirk can't actually destroy Quirks, leaving him with a rampaging Quirk he can do nothing about but either transfer or die from. Notably, he actually screams 'Crap!'.
    • The original All For One has one when he realizes Aoyama and Deku have outplayed him. While he openly remains composed, in his internal monologue, he's progressively taken back when each stage of their plan to take him down goes into effect.
    • His smug attitude gets ground down during the fight with Team Endeavor. He is taken off-guard by the vestiges of his quirks rebelling against him. This leaves him vulnerable and unable to react fast enough to stop the heroes cracking, then shattering his Cool Mask.
    • The Vestige of himself undergoing a Split-Personality Merge with Tomura is shocked when 'Tenko Shimura' briefly assumes control to throw a childish retort at Mirio's claims that Tomura's misanthropy was born from lacking friends, meaning he can better resist All For One.
    • His vestige self freaks out when Izuku unleashes the 2nd's 'Gearshift' Quirk against him, vomiting blood helplessly as Izuku pummels him with attacks equivalent to 120% of All Might's strength.
    • When he senses Tokoyami preparing to attack him full force, his smile disappears before he turns around and sees a Kaiju-sized Dark Shadow towering over him and he's genuinely taken aback.
    • After being reminded of the final words Nana Shimura spoke to him, All For One is horrified to realize All Might intends on blowing himself up and taking him with him.
  • O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Rule of Thumb: If that smile of his leaves his face for any length of time, it's a sign things aren't going well.
    • When he finds out that Star and Stripe effectively booby-trapped her Quirk by imposing a rule that would cause it to rebel against other Quirks leaves the normally calm and composed All For One in a state of genuine panic and fury, his usual smile replaced with a twisted scowl as he realizes he's trapped with a rampaging Quirk he can't control and is going to destroy him from the inside out. Even the more composed original All For One isn't smiling anymore.
    • After falling for the heroes' plan to trap him, All For One's typical aura of smugness falls apart. While openly trying to appear mildly annoyed, under the surface he's shown to be frantically trying to reassure himself he's in control. His normal manner of speaking and taunting becomes much more frustrated and angry, showing just how much the heroes caught him flat footed.
    • After Jiro inspires the vestiges to rise up against him, All For One smiles... but it's a forced, frustrated smile, showing just how much the heroes have got under his skin by this point.
    • After Tokoyami shatters his mask, All For One starts screaming at the heroes and goes completely berserk almost to the degree of his vestige inside of Tomura and in complete contrast to the composed, confidence he normally radiates. This especially stands out because All For One's shallow emotions means him getting angry at all is a sign something has truly gone off the rails.
    • Chapter 369 opens with a flashback of All For One killing the Second User with Berserker Tears streaming down his face. This is particurly notable as All For One is noted In-Universe to be a true psychopath and should be incapable of feeling strong enough emotions to cry.
    • Chapter 379 has his vestige within Shigaraki practically foaming at the mouth when Lady Nagant arrives to help Midoriya.
  • Ominous Obsidian Ooze: He can generate some kind of black sludge-like substance, and shoot it with enough force to stop an attack from Hawks. Likewise, his Warping Quirk manifests as black slime. When Yoichi and Izuku are able to get a glimpse of All For One's Mental World thanks to the synchronisation between their opposing Quirks, the vestige version of himself is shown to be gushing the stuff out like it was High-Pressure Blood, as he struggles to assimilate the remaining aspects of Tomura's individuality, becoming more and more unstable as the fighting progresses.
  • Only Known by Their Nickname: All For One is only known by his villain identity. His true identity is a complete mystery and it takes over two hundred chapters before we get even the smallest detail. This is true even among the holders of One For All, despite the first of them being All For One's brother. All For One's identity has been lost over the years to the point that All Might didn't immediately realize the connection between Tomura Shigaraki and All For One even though it's revealed in Chapter 237 that "Shigaraki" is All For One's surname. This even applies In-Universe to an extent— All Might theories the original All For One went out of his way to avoid confronting Star and Stripe becuase he'd have recognised the term "All For One" as his name, and thus been subject to New Order's abilities. In his own mind, even All For One thinks of the term as his 'true' name, rather than his Quirk's, showing how he embraces every aspect of his supervilliany.
  • Orcus on His Throne: Zigzagged and justified opposed to most examples, as All For One is aware of his and Shigaraki's shortcomings and that a head-to-head fight with the heroes is not a guarantee of victory despite their combined might. Early on he prefers to recuperate with his body so weakened and only steps in when he's sure Shigaraki will mature and grow capable of handling his original All For One Quirk. After he frees himself from jail, he again prefers to take it slow and wait for Shigaraki to reach full compatibility with his original Quirk before attempting to steal One For All and kill Izuku again. He only ever personally takes to the battlefield if he's set up a situation where his plans will be furthered regardless of his victory or loss, or if he's absolutely confident there's no possibility of him losing, which the heroes exploit in the end by tricking him into thinking that all his plans are proceeding as he envisioned, leading him to walk straight into a trap along with his assembled forces when he tries to strike the final blow on Izuku and steal One For All for good.
  • Otaku: Ironically, All For One boils down to being a giant nerd whose entire motivation is based off being peeved that a comic featuring a conflict between a superhero and an almighty Demon Lord inevitably ended in the Demon Lord's defeat. So, in real life, he seeks to overwrite this ending into one where he (seeing himself as the Demon Lord) wins instead. While vain, evil, and selfish, there is a hilarious petty streak to him that shows he's not much better than a toxic fanboy despite his delusions of grandeur and supervillain roleplaying.
  • Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Aware Stain was against him every since he escaped tartarus on his own terms, All For One held a few Quirks in reserve to counter his Quirk, should it ever be used against him. When Stain does successfully ambush him alongside All Might, he escapes through using his contingency to force all his paralysed blood out of his body, leaving him briefly covered in his own blood. He mockingly thanks Stain for it, as he claims losing that much blood helped him to cool down and start thinking more clearly.
  • Parental Substitute:
    • He raised Shigaraki ever since the latter was a five-year-old. All for the sole purpose of taunting All Might and tainting Nana Shimura's legacy.
    • He is eventually revealed to be doing this to teens and children at the low points all over Japan, taking them in so that he can brainwash them into being his minions.
  • People Puppets: Forced Quirk Activation: it even works on unconscious people. Given All For One's power-hungry tendencies, he tends to view people as puppets, something his brother calls him out on.
  • Perpetual Smiler: When not wearing his mask, All For One always has a Psychotic Smirk on his face. Hawks takes note of this and outright wonders if All For One is actually incapable of feeling true hatred for people. During the Final Battle, inside his Mental World, which showcases his full range of expression underneath his Cool Masksuch as it is— All For One is shown to break out into a wide smile even when he's going This Cannot Be! at the efforts of the vestiges contained within him in fighting against him, inspired by the efforts of a 'side character' like Jiro. This implies that no matter what negative emotions All For One experiences, he habitually defaults to a smile irrespective of how he's truly feeling, just in this case, this smile is visibly more forced and frustrated than he'd otherwise shown before. The smile finally vanishes from his face after Tokoyami manages to shatter his damaged mask into fragments, forcing All For One to recognize that he's actually losing the fight and literally explode into a Villainous Breakdown in denial of that fact. His inner self is shown to be actually screaming in rage as it brutally subdues the attacking vestiges with a feral wrath despite his psychopath nature, showing just how badly the situation is going for him.
  • Personality Powers:
    • All For One is defined by selfishness and every relationship he has is ultimately him viewing the other person as his possession rather than a person. He is a kleptomaniac who can't resist stealing something he wants and even his endgame consists of turning his own Quirk into a parasite to leech off someone else's Character Development because he can't or won't try to meaningfully develop as a person himself. As such, his main ability making him a Power Parasite is immensely fitting.
    • Whilst it isn't his power, the rewind energy he absorbed from the Erasure bullets also fits. When he activates it, it bring him back from death (which he'd expressed fear of imminently prior) and immediately undoes his crippling injuries and restores his good looks, letting him revel in his restored strength to torment the heroes just like he used to at the height of his power. Furthermore, the energy renders him effectively invincible, undoing injuries, even fatal ones, in seconds, highlighting his underlying motivation: a spiteful, petty childish refusal to lose at any cost. All For One takes several damaging attacks that would have killed him individually, only for all of them to be nullified by the rewind energy, almost acting like a child's "everything-proof shield". Furthermore, the more damage done, the younger the energy renders him, effectively stripping away the grandiose aura of the intimidating Symbol of Evil and exposing the Psychopathic Manchild that he really is at his core with every loss he denies.
  • Person of Mass Destruction: This guy is capable of completely obliterating multiple city blocks with a single attack.
  • Pitiful Worms: His god complex and obsession with Quirks means he tends to look down upon people in general if they don't serve a purpose in his grand plans and sees them mainly as walking containers for their powers than individuals with their own thoughts and feelings. This crops up a bit with his original self sincerely seeing the events unfolding around him as if he were living a real-life comic book, claiming that 'Jobbber Characters' like Izuku's classmates have no chance against the 'Demon Lord', and referring to them in terms of their closeness to One For All. His wording even implies that he doesn't see Izuku himself as anything less than a convenient means of finally stealing One For All, a mere vessel for the Quirk rather than an opponent to be taken seriously. The vestige version of himself merged into Tomura, in the process of becoming the 'perfected Demon Lord', really let's this show, looking down on all his opponents' efforts as futile attempts to overcome an all-powerful god, and riding a constant power high as he adapts to or destroys every tactic they pull against him.
    All For One (through Tomura): (After expelling Amajiki's poison through a mouth grown on his body) Pathetic!! My body continues to adapt!! Scurry away like insects! Nothing can bring me down!
  • Play-Along Prisoner: It's all but stated outright that he can break free from Tartarus at any time he wants and only stays there because it will force his protégé, Shigaraki, to become independent and develop as a villainous mastermind. It's later revealed this was actually a bluff, and he was genuinely trapped within the prison, requiring him to exploit the Psychic Link between his vestige and original selves to launch a simultaneous attack to escape. He also makes it clear later on that he's dismissive of his original crippled body as well, in favor of the "Perfect Demon Lord", so he didn't actually mind that version of himself being trapped whilst his plans were underway.
  • Playing with Fire: One of the Quirks he uses in the final battle is Hardflame Fan, which lets him generate a wall of flame as a defense mechanism. However, it is vastly inferior to Endeavor's Hellflame as the latter is able to easily overpower it using Vanishing Fist.
  • Power at a Price: Powers granted to others by "All For One" have a chance of bad side effects, as their bodies can't handle the strain of multiple Quirks. The Reveal that One For All's own power stockpiling comes with the cost of inflicting Rapid Aging on the wielders born with a natural Quirk (though thanks to All For One, only one of them ever lived long enough to perish from this side-effect) implies that there might be long-term side effects to receiving more powers that one's body is naturally suited to handle from birth. Interestingly, All For One has himself demonstrated no adverse side effects despite his endless hoarding of powers for generations, implying that, like Izuku and Yagi, he's immune to any negative drawbacks from hoarding so many abilities because his Quirk, having no effect unless it has other Quirks to interact with, doesn't count as a Quirk on its own merits, leaving his 'Vessel' empty and functionally making him Quirkless. That said, the only limit he does have is that he has problems using Quirks that are too powerful for his body to handle.
  • The Power of Hate: The one emotion that All For One seems to have faith in is hatred. His entire plan revolves around raising Shigaraki to be the most angry, hate filled person physically possible, hoping that sheer hate will provide the willpower needed for his Vestige in his Quirk to merge with him and finally steal One For All. However, All For One is so fixated on this, to the point of viewing empathy and remorse as weaknesses, that it blinds him to how powerful its polar opposite is. Indeed, he believed his mental merging into Tomura was completed by the point he showed up to 'confront' Izuku for the Final Battle, and is taken off-guard when the fighting exposes the 'Tenko Shimura' Tomura's childhood self and remaining innocence, still exists, able to resist his mental assimilation because of the happier childhood memories he does possess, a possibility All For One was completely blind to. Ironically enough, despite believing it to be superior, All For One's psychopathy means he himself can't actually get invested enough in the conflict to actually hate anybody— and even then, he mockingly invokes this in a roundabout manner to further piss everybody off.
  • Power Palms: While it's easy to miss, in the manga, All For One has small holes in the palms of his hands. While not directly stated, it's implied that these are holes are what allow him to steal and give Quirks. This implication is furthered when Shigaraki gains holes in his palms as well after gaining "All For One" for himself. Accordingly, attacking or incapacitating his hands is one way to prevent him stealing a Quirk, though it's easier said than done with his immense power and speed, even in a crippled state.
  • Power Parasite: The essence of All For One, which allows him to steal others' Quirks for himself. All For One himself; because his psychopathy leaves him lacking the emotional capacity to steal One For All, he's hoping to use Tomura's sheer hatred to counter this. Otherwise, All For One has no means of acquiring One For All on his own merits and is using Tomura like a leech.
  • Powers as Programs: "All For One" can steal the Quirks of others, allowing him to either use them himself, or "upload" them into another person. He can also choose to turn his stolen Quirks on or off, letting him avoid having to walk around with various mutation Quirks constantly active. With a completely different slate of them during his second fight with All Might as noted by Gran Torino, it's unclear if he is capable of losing Quirks over time, if it was a case of him simply not using them, or if he since gave them away. The fact that he was actually using an artificial replica of All For One at the time after having given the original to Dr. Garaki, as it's not clear exactly when he made the switch.
  • Practically Joker: Let's see, he wears a natty suit and at one point wore a hat, his default expression is a constant Slasher Smile, he has a twisted obsession with the main hero, is a blatant Card-Carrying Villain and a Diabolical Mastermind with a vast criminal empire, has a warped sense of humor, and has scarring on his face. Plus, after stopping All Might's Suicide Attack on him, his age regressing body destabilizing from all the immense power he wields leads to his face splitting open from how wide he smiles, forming an extremely horrible, Joker-like grin before the damage is rewound again. It's not at all difficult to see more than a few similarities between All For One and the Clown Prince of Crime.
  • Psychic Link:
    • In the Paranormal Liberation War Arc, All for One reveals that every Quirk factor bares the imprint of the user's consciousness, and due to All for One's unique ability to steal others' Quirks, he also receives that imprint. He speaks of how in his dreams the former owners of the Quirks he stole would hurl abuse and haunt him but disappear when he gives the Quirks away. This fact is also the reason why the former bearers of One for All can speak with the current holder and why after transferring All For One to Shigaraki, it also transferred part of his consciousness, allowing him to influence Shigaraki and even take control of him. In Chapter 297, he takes advantage of the Psychic Link created by his body and Shigaraki's to shut down the security system at Tartarus from the inside and outside simultaneously, freeing himself and a bunch of dangerous prisoners as new followers. It's noted this would give them a huge advantage in a fight together, which is why a major aspect of their plan to beat him revolves around not letting them use it.
    • Furthermore, his Quirk shares some perceptiveness toward its brother Quirk One For All, with One For All users able to somewhat sense him and Tomura as well. How deep the connection goes hasn't entirely been elaborated on.
  • Psychological Projection: It becomes clear by the endgame that a large number of the flaws he pointed out in Tomura are actually his own deep down. He's every bit the immature and a petulant child he accused Tomura of being, he's just much better at hiding it.
  • Psychopathic Manchild: Though more outwardly composed and dignified, All For One is even worse than Shigaraki in this regard, and it's apparent where the former's childishness in the beginning came from. His desire was to become a demon lord from an Isekai manga he read as a child and was so enamored with it, he ignored that the heroes triumphed in the end. Everything he's done since is living out his child fantasy, acting like a real-life comic book villain who can only be defeated by the protagonist. While he carries himself with a gentlemanly decorum, this is because he's grown accustomed to events proceeding as he intended and always working in his favor, and it's when things stop going his way that it becomes clear how much of a brat he really is. This is most prominent in the Final Battle, when it's obvious he's no longer in control despite trying to stack everything in his favor, he throws a temper tantrum about how unfair it is that he can't use his "next me" body to its fullest potential, coming across as a petulant child than the Diabolical Mastermind he'd been for most of the story.
  • Pyrrhic Victory:
    • His battle with Star and Stripe effectively amounts to this. Though he managed to kill her and remove the biggest obstacle to his plans, it came at the cost of many of his stockpiled Quirks thanks to New Order going on a rampage within his Vestige World. Also, because he had so many Quirks, New Order ended up destroying itself, thus keeping the Quirk he fought so hard to obtain forever out of his reach. On top of that, because he was forced to fight Star while Shigaraki's body was incomplete, the damage from the fight ended up delaying Shigaraki's perfection by a week, giving the heroes more time to prepare for the final battle.
    • During the Final Battle, this is the ultimate outcome of his fight with the heroes at Gunga. He eventually succeeds in beating them all, but in doing so he was actually killed by them — multiple times — and had to 'cheat' through using Rewind to remain a credible threat. Even then, they managed to burn through so much of his remaining time he used up all his extra years and Rewind is burning through his original lifespan. Even worse, his actual goal, to reach and stabilize his "next me" is now up in smoke, as they bought enough time for Tomura to retake control and destroy his Vestige. He leaves the battle Living on Borrowed Time with no clear plan for winning anymore and having failed to actually break any of his enemies' spirits, even if he physically pummeled them.
  • Rage Breaking Point:
    • When the heroes' plan to enact the Final Battle on their terms goes into motion and successfully Out-Gambitted him despite his extensive planning, his Smug Super attitude is rapidly undermined, and his attempts to remain outwardly calm and composed only make it clearer just how pissed he's becoming from suffering repeated setbacks and unable to do anything himself to influence the outcome. After his Life-Support mask is successfully smashed to pieces and he realises that switching to a copied version of his Quirk weakened his control over the vestiges of his stockpiled power, enabling them to resist him, he snaps, violently suppressing them with an animalistic fury, his vestige self deforming into a monstrous shape as it literally devours the vestiges' consciousness to forcibly regain control and his physical body exploding with his Combat Tentacles in order to both reassembles his mask through sheer force of will and to skewer the heroes who managed to humiliate him so, with only Endeavor's return preventing his vicious counter-attack from working.
    • He hits another one of these when the heroes are ganging up on him and literally smashing him into dust, recognizing that he's wasted far too much of his remaining lifespan fighting them and is in danger of vanishing without being able to reach Tomura. This time, he channels the feeling directly into his Quirks to empower them, overwhelming both the heroes and the limitations of his physical body as he does so, with only Rewind keeping him 'alive'. He expresses unfamiliarity with the sensation, believing that it comes about from his Psychic Link to Tomura allowing him to actually experience deep-seated rage for once, rather than something he could always do. This implies that despite his furious displays prior, he still wasn't truly feeling angry deep down.
  • Randomly Gifted: As one of the first people with a Quirk, he is this by necessity. It is especially notable as he has the greatest Quirk to ever exist. That said, given Quirks have a degree of Personality Powers to them, his particular ability is implied to have been partially informed by the type of man he was at his core.
  • Rank Scales with Asskicking: All For One is the true leader of the League of Villains, and the most powerful character in the whole series, only matched by All Might. It takes him seconds to defeat several top-ranked Heroes.
  • Readings Are Off the Scale: According to the Official Character Guide, All For One ranks 6/5 in terms of intelligence. This is fitting for a Diabolical Mastermind whose intelligence is his best asset.
  • Really 700 Years Old: He's actually a first-generation Quirk user, and his Life Force Quirk (which was given to him by Dr. Garaki) extends his lifespan at the cost of athletic ability. According to Gran Torino, All For One was at least over a hundred years old and at that time, All Might was just 18.
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
    • Gives one to Izuku, ecstatic he gets to pick on who he perceives to be an incompetent child. He describes him as mediocre and worthless, confused as to why All Might would ever pick him as the next successor, but overjoyed his last target to steal One For All from seems to be the easiest mark of them all to drive home how much of a colossal Jerkass he truly is. His reveling is interrupted when his brother Yoichi calmly rebukes him and voices his support of Izuku with a So Proud of You speech in return.
    • Pretty much every time he talks to a hero, especially those with personal animosity towards him, has his dialogue peppered with these, both as a psychological tactic and because he really enjoys getting under their skin. By the time the Final Battle kicks off, every sentence he speaks is this, constantly berating the heroes for being so foolish as to keep fighting him and not accepting the inevitability of his absolute victory. By that point, however, it's a sign that he's in a spiraling Villainous Breakdown, as the situation keeps slipping out of control and he keeps getting humiliated in the fighting, resulting in his accusations becoming more frustrated and spiteful. Additionally, because he's so great at riling up the heroes with these, it leaves them in no mood to show mercy towards him, resulting in him suffering nearly fatal attacks from extremely pissed-off foes.
  • Red and Black and Evil All Over: His original Quirk All For One manifests energy in the form of black lightning with red outlines.
  • Red Eyes, Take Warning: The anime gives him red eyes, as shown in episode 90, but they are still shrouded in darkness. His right eye regrowing after Endeavor almost burns him to ashes is a sign that the battle hasn't yet ended in the heroes' victory over him.
  • Retgone: A Zigzagged case. He's forced to activate Eri's Rewind Quirk as an emergency option when Endeavour fatally burns him, using its Fountain of Youth capabilities as a temporary Healing Factor and Hour of Power alongside his own lifespan, rewinding him to his prime years and preventing the heroes from physically killing him anymore. That said, his inability to control the power means he fully acknowledges the non-stop rewinding will be fatal for him regardless. Whilst his body is physically rewinding through his life, his prior actions aren't being erased from history. However, the narrative also makes the point that, thanks to his own selfish nature, they might as well be, as he's utterly failed at leaving a lasting legacy in the history books or through his 'successor'. When the Rewind energy erases him, it will be like he never existed at all.
  • Rooting for the Empire: An In-Universe example. Unlike normal people, growing up he rooted for the Demon Lord of the comics he and Yoichi read. He actually intends to completely invert this as his core motivation for his villainy. As he outlines to Hawks, he wants to be utterly despised by everybody on a international level, seeing the degree of animosity and fear stoked by the presence of a villain as indicative of their success at being 'true' villains. Since he intends to become the undisputed villain that rules over all others, this extends to inspiring the same animosity amongst even his ostensible 'allies', many of whom partner with him because they need his power and resources, not out of personal regard of him, barring a few exceptions. When Tomura demonstrates that his all-consuming hatred towards the world also now extends towards his master as he's forcibly merging their psyches, All For One expresses nothing but happiness at his 'successor' also hating him, despite their seemingly close bond.
  • Rule of Symbolism: His identity-obscuring injuries and lack of information about who he was an an individual before he became a villain, are symbolic of how his identity has been utterly consumed by the 'mask' of a super villain. The paneling of some artworks even goes out of the way to frame him in such a manner that he doesn't appear to be human anymore, and he intentionally wears a stylised Cool Mask shaped like a blackened skull, referencing both his shadowy threat level and how anybody could have become like him if they had the chance to, like he embodies the concept of evil in the hearts of all. However, as a significant portion of the Final Battle is dedicated to steadily tearing him off his high horse, this becomes likewise undone. A combination of a fatal torching by Endeavour and him activating Eri's Rewind Quirk to survive forces him back into his original human identity, clad in rags and without any of the grandiose trappings he adorned himself with in preparation for his final victory, and the uncontrollable rewinding further reverts him back to his younger years. This showcases how he's reverting backwards from the 'Symbol of Evil' he crafted himself to be into the childish true identity he tried to discard, as the fighting gradually proves how he's Not So Invincible After All.
  • Sadist: All For One specializes in tormenting and psychologically breaking others to catch them off guard and cause them suffering just for the hell of it.
    • In his final battle with All Might, he gleefully reveals that Tomura Shigaraki is actually Tenko Shimura, Nana Shimura's grandson, knowing the knowledge would hurt All Might the most. He even rebuffs All Might's claim that it's a lie by pointing out that this is exactly the type of thing he would do.
    • During the Villain Hunt Arc, he has Lady Nagant explode in front of Midoriya just as he's about to turn her to his side solely to demoralize the boy. Afterward, he sends villain after villain to wear him down and make it easy to steal One For All.
    • During the Final Battle, the vestige of himself that's undergoing a Split-Personality Merge with Tomura derides Bakugo's efforts to become strong enough to be the number one hero, mocking him that all his impressive progress and potential means nothing before him. Nonetheless, he is singularly focused on killing Bakugo as painfully as possible for one reason only — because he's Izuku's Friendly Rival, and All For One is ever focused on hurting and breaking Izuku as much as he can both to steal One For All from him and for the sheer pleasure of watching his suffering. He even notes with genuine glee that his Quirks being sealed by Erasure is actually a benefit to him in this case, because it means that when he gruesomely crushes Bakugo to pieces, he'll leave a body behind he can dangle in from of Izuku to further demoralize him. He even goes the extra mile of taunting Bakugo that his hopes of becoming the number one hero are useless when contrasted against One For All's sheer might, and that Bakugo is doomed to forever be a mere side-character to Izuku's story regardless of how strong he gets. Notably, whilst it's hard to tell at times whether Tomura or All For one is in command of the body, it's made crystal clear that this sadistic tormenting is all from All For One.
      All For One: Your thoughts? Feelings? What you strive for? No. Katsuki Bakugo... the only thing about you that catches my interest is how you're closer to Izuku Midoriya than anyone else.
  • Sanity Has Advantages:
    • All For One's psychopathy makes him a ruthless, dangerous individual...but also, as Hawks points out, is one of his biggest weaknesses, as it blinds him to certain things and makes him physically incapable of becoming truly emotionally invested in anything. This is a problem, as his inability to become invested means he underestimates his opponents and can't work up the emotional will needed to achieve his goal of stealing One For All.
    • All For One's sheer love of Kick the Dog, no matter the circumstances, makes him extremely predictable to the heroes once they've figured out his overarching goals. They simply set up a situation that would allow him to mentally break Izuku all alone and he reacts precisely as predicted, simply because he just can't resist reveling in his own monstrous nature at the expense of others.
    • His genuine belief that the world they're in ascribes to comic-book logic because of the advent of Quirks and that there's no way for mere 'Jobber Characters' to meaningfully damage the 'Demon King' or do anything more than demonstrate his overwhelming power in a fight with them leads to him critically underestimating his opponents, allowing them to take him off-guard and severely damage his Life-Support mask because he does not have any kind of narrative Plot Armour protecting him or guaranteeing his victory against anybody.
    • His pathological obsession with One For All has screwed him over repeatedly because no matter how much of a pragmatic move just killing its bearers when it was still weak would've been, he simply couldn't stand doing so before he had the chance to steal it.
    • When he uses Rewind to revert to his prime, his narcissism means he both can't resist wasting his now limited time relishing in his restored body, bragging about his raw power, and letting those who have already bruised his gigantic ego continue to get a rise out of him and further distract him. All Might specifically exploits this to delay him reaching Izuku when all other attempts at forcibly stopping him weren't quite enough, by giving him a target he can't resist destroying even with his scant remaining time almost having run out. All For One's inner monologue shows he's well aware of what All Might is doing, but still can't resist the urge to mangle him. Furthermore, All Might even pulls a Deliberate Injury Gambit to hold All For One still long enough to hit him with a Kill Sat, aware that despite the risk for him instantly caving his head in, the villain wouldn't go for an instant kill and would instead hit his old Game-Breaking Injury, just to relish in All Might's expression of pain instead. This leaves All Might crippled, but still alive and able to counterattack.
  • Sanity Slippage: His Villainous Breakdown combined with Rewind messing with his emotions does not do his sanity any favors. By the time he's intercepted by All Might, he's become completely unstable and manic. He can't even try to maintain his previous composure, screaming all of his dialog with even his font showing how unhinged he is now.
  • Satanic Archetype: In the past, All For One amassed loyal followers by presenting them what they desired the most. He would cast people away once they became useless. If anyone dared to oppose his will, they would be purged. All For One goes out of his way to commit evil acts and for no apparent reason. One of his principles is to overwhelm his enemy with misery before killing them. Just as All Might is this brilliant savior figure, he is the opposite, a shadowy threat. He even hands out deals to people desperate for their loved ones, like how he manipulated Aoyama's parents into accepting him giving Navel Laser to their son, only to met out worse punishments as "rewards" to keep them in line, like how All for One blackmailed Aoyama into becoming the U.A. Traitor otherwise he would kill his parents, leading to Aoyama's breakdown. By the time of the Final Battle, when he activates Eri's Rewind as part of his Thanatos Gambit, he goes back to his appearance before his fight against All Might, with beautiful white hair and covered in bright golden energy, much like Lucifer before falling. To drive the comparison further home, he steals Hawks' Quirk, giving himself a pair blood-red wings, fitting perfectly the Fallen Angel archetype as well.
  • Scars are Forever: None of the regeneration Quirks he's obtained have been able to fix the massive injuries and scars inflicted upon him by All Might. According to his doctor, it's because the wounds had already scarred up and stabilized before he'd gotten a Quirk powerful enough to fix them, and if he'd gotten the necessary Quirk while they were still fresh, they could have been fixed. When he's almost killed from Endevour's firepower, he counters his impending death by activating a variant of Eri's Rewind Quirk he gained from the Destroying Bullets Tomura scavenged from the hospital, the first sign of their effect being his right eye and left ear regrowing from his charred husk of a body as he's de-aged years in seconds, back to a time before All Might ever scarred him.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: While he initially makes half-hearted attempts to flee the final battle to help his 'other me,' he still lets himself be provoked into continuing to fight the heroes and prepares to go full on to attack them... until Tokoyami's Full Release form actively scares him and beats him into the ground, causing his extra years to expire and him to start visibly deaging. A combination of Tokoyami actually having a fair chance of beating him and his time almost having run out causes All For One to instantly try to cut and run. When he tries to steal Tokoyami's Quirk shortly after, Mineta grabs his attention for a few seconds and makes All For One realize it simply isn't worth dealing with them with his time so short, and he finally races off to Shigaraki.
    All For One: The braying howls of the weak... But every precious second counts.
  • Selective Obliviousness:
    • As the Final Battle goes on, it becomes apparent that All For One simply refuses to accept the fact he's Not So Invincible After All and can actually lose. Every time the heroes manage to pull one over on him, he tries to pretend it didn't actually count and his internal monologue consists of frantically trying to convince himself he's still on top. When Endeavor kills him, forcing him to use Rewind, he states his old body is expendable, but Hawks' later Shut Up, Hannibal! and All For One's reaction to it makes it clear he's still furious about it and he calls bringing it up 'splitting hairs.' The only loss All For One has ever suffered in his life he will actually admit to was All Might nearly killing him, and that's only because he was so badly wounded and everything he built destroyed that he can't deny it. Even then, the moment he can transfer his grudge to Deku, he attempts to write off All Might as not worth his time anymore, when his Villainous Breakdown against Star and it being implied All Might literally traumatized him makes it clear that's not the case.
    • He mocked Yoichi for believing that him becoming the "Demon Lord" from their comic would spell his inevitable defeat, as The Good Guys Always Win, countering that reality didn't necessarily follow the rules of a comic book. However, his ranting against the heroes during his ongoing loss reveals that he actually applied the same logic to the Demon Lord, believing he'd become unbeatable by 'side characters' by becoming the character in reality. His Humiliation Conga is merely a long example of him eating his own words.
    • When All Might dons his armor and fights All For One in an attempt to stall him, All For One tries to deny the fact the plot to exploit his hatred of All Might is working. All Might promptly calls him out on it just being desperation to avoid admitting things aren't going his way, and mocking him for how undignified it is.
  • Seven Deadly Sins: Fitting for the Resident Big Bad and author of most of the misery and opposition heroes like All Might and Izuku have to go through, All For One shows traits of all seven of the sins. He's incredibly arrogant and egotistical, has a compulsive greed and hunger to steal Quirks he fancies and is obsessed with stealing One For All, implied to be tied to an envious wanting of what others naturally possess, has a lust for power and control, reacts with extreme rage to any challenge to his image of the all-powerful demon lord, and prefers to leave the dirty work to his underlings and rarely does anything himself.
  • Skull for a Head: His life support mask looks uncomfortably like a menacing skull. His unmasked head also bears a resemblance to this as well, helped by the fact he constantly has a Slasher Smile on in moments where he's feeling particularly self-assured in his victory, either immediately or long-term.
  • Shadow Archetype:
    • Just like Bakugo, All For One grew up to become an entitled bully because he was born with an extremely powerful Quirk. But unlike Bakugo (who eventually had some sense knocked into him and was forced to acknowledge that "extras" can catch up to and surpass him) All For One's ability is so naturally potent that he was able to doge any sort of reality-check.
    • To Endeavor, to the point that Endeavor is selected to be All For One's opponent in the final battle. His grooming of young Tenko Shimura to be his successor mirrors Endeavor's abuse of his children, a fact All For One gleefully rubs in Endeavor's face. However, while Endeavor realized the error of his ways and seeks to atone for his past sins, All For One feels no such regret for his crimes, serving as a dark reflection of what Endeavor could've been if he never grew a conscience.
  • Shadow Dictator: Invoked by All For One. He has been pulling strings of the underworld within the shadows. Even other criminals don't know much about him, except for urban legends.
  • Shock and Awe: As he starts getting targeted by multiple Heroes during the final battle, he started utilizing an unnamed Lightning Quirk that fires black bolts from multiple points from his body.
  • Shout-Out: His mask is very blatantly inspired by Darth Vader. In practice, his role as a character is more akin to Palpatine with Shigaraki taking the place of Vader as his apprentice.
  • Shrouded in Myth: Before his fight with All Might in Kamino, All For One's existence was unknown to virtually everyone. Even villains presumed that All For One was just an urban legend. Nothing is known about All For One's origins, habits, or preferences except that he enjoys committing evil. Very few are aware that All For One once had a younger brother.
  • Sibling Yin-Yang: With his younger brother Yoichi. AFO is a psychopath Card-Carrying Villain who revels in power and sadism, was born with the strongest Quirk in the series and believes in the supremacy of powerful Quirk users. Meanwhile, Yoichi is a kind-hearted All-Loving Hero who fights for peace in society, had a (seemingly) useless ability that he was initially completely unaware of, and believes that moral strength is what's truly important.
  • Slasher Smile:
    • His counterpoint to All Might's smiles of reassurance to people in danger, signaling to others that they're in impending danger. He's constantly cracking wide, toothy grins whenever he's getting particularly emotionally worked up, smug or satisfied with his victory, which helps sell how there's something off about him. Hawks even brings this trait of his up, noting that his near-constant smile is a sign of him being psychopathic, unable to relate properly to others on an emotional level and utterly disconnected from them in terms of his own desires and wants. Hawks even posits that Character Tic is a sign that, despite the generations-long feud with the holders of One For All, All For One cannot become emotionally invested in taking them down, which is the very reason he cannot overcome One For All's Heroic Willpower and steal the Quirk.
      Hawks: Think about it. That guy...never stops smiling, right?
      Endeavor: Something's missing in his soul, huh?
    • Subverted after Jiro manages to inspire the vestiges to stand up to him. In the vestige world, he tries to give one of his signature smiles, but due to his Villainous Breakdown, it comes across as forced and frustrated rather than its typical evil glee. It whole-heartedly vanishes from both his physical and vestige self's faces when Tokoyami breaks his mask, forcing him to face the fact he's actually losing the fight and devolve into apocalyptic rage in spiteful denial of reality.
    • When he activates a variant of Eri's Rewind Quirk to reset his impending death by Endeavor's hands, his smug smile compounds his Nightmare Face as he taunts the heroes for thinking he wouldn't have a trick up his sleeve to compensate for his lack of a Healing Factor.
    • His reaction to seeing All Might standing before him in challenge at the end of Chapter 386 is a wide-eyed, insane grin.
  • Smug Super: His arrogance, manipulative nature, and outright malice are matched by a tremendous amount of power. Deconstructed, however: as powerful and competent All For One is, he's not as invincible or infallible as he thinks he is. As a result, he genuinely believes he's already won and actually winning is a formality. This blows up in his face when a large part of the heroes' plan to trap and defeat him for good is simply to allow him to believe things are going exactly as planned, something All For One doesn't question because to him, that's the natural way for things to progress. This sees him completely blindsided when he learns too late that they're decidedly not and the trap is sprung.
  • The Social Darwinist: All For One espouses this belief during his battle with Team Endeavor, mocking Jirou's defiance against him. To him, it doesn't matter how much willpower and determination you have. If you don't have the strength to back it up, you're worthless. He's quickly proven wrong, however, when the collective wills of the people whose Quirks he's stolen rise up and hold him back long enough for Jirou and Hawks to land a decisive blow and crack his mask.
    All For One: Motives, words, deeds, abilities. All I'm seeing here is the stuff of weaklings. Not nearly good enough! Your power is so very underwhelming!
  • The Sociopath: Befitting one known as the Symbol of Evil, All For One carries all the traits of a classic psychopath: he has no empathy or remorse for all the things he has done, shamelessly bragging to his brother about how his followers had wiped out a faction of Quirk users who refused to join him. He views others as mere pawns to be used. He lies and manipulates others with ease. He's a Sadist who enjoys getting under other people's skin, often taunting All Might about the death of his mentor. He is incredibly arrogant and condescending to the point of megalomania and is charismatic enough to gain a loyal following of villains to serve under him. Even when he does something to help someone, it's never out of pure altruism and he always has an ulterior motive:
    All For One: (in response to a Heroic Sacrifice) Thank you for such wonderful comedy!
  • Soft-Spoken Sadist: His simmering malice is made all the more unsettling by his casual, borderline jovial manner of speaking.
  • Sore Loser:
    • Rather than graciously accept defeat in his fights or admit that his brother was right about his doomed quest to become like the demon lord in their favorite comic, All For One will scheme, insult, and squirm his way out of every situation no matter how unethical the means. It's implied that part of his surviving his defeat at All Might's hands, even without Hyper Regeneration, was his sheer refusal to accept the loss, motivating him to cling to life no matter what, and he goes out of his way to torment Yagi in ways large and small afterwards, in part because it benefits his plans, but also because he's that spiteful towards the man who emerged victorious against him. He screams in a blind rage when Star out gambits him during their battle.
    • He childishly whines about how "unfair" the fight with Izuku is, being outnumbered, depowered, and isolated from his allies despite this exact scenario being what he intended to do to the last One For All wielder. This childish entitlement to his "victory" despite having stacked the deck as much as he could showcases just how far he's willing to go to ensure that he will ultimately triumph over his enemies.
  • Space Master: He has an unnamed quirk that lets him twist an area of space similar to the Robot Nomu.
  • Stepford Smiler: A twisted example. He almost always has an evil grin on his face, which acts as a Foil to All Might.
  • Sticky Fingers: In his own words, once he spots an irresistibly useful Quirk, he's just got to have it.
    All For One: It's not right, I know. When I see a good Quirk, I just need to have it. Definitely a bad habit of mine.
  • Story-Breaker Power: Even for a first-generation Quirk user, All For One's Quirk is extremely powerful and advantageous. All For One can steal all kinds of Quirks, and easily De-power entire crowds of Quirk users. All For One can defeat several top heroes with absurd ease. The only Quirk that is immune to his power is One For All, which can only be willingly transferred to someone else.
  • Stronger with Age: Played With. As time went by, he did have the opportunity to collect more and more Quirks, thus growing in direct power. However, All For One's body has no innate capacity to grow along with the power it needs to support, and with several centuries of life under his belt, he became concerned that his body would eventually break down and lose control over his many Quirks. This became more of an issue due to the Quirk Singularity, in which Quirks became more complex and powerful with each generation, and thus harder for him to properly take and control. His Quirk may be powerful, but ultimately, it's still a first-generation Quirk. A good chunk of Dr. Garaki's research was dedicated to augmenting him so that he would be able to properly handle this power.
  • Stupid Evil: Normally, he's very good at avoiding doing anything to harm his plans, but when he gets an opportunity to harm someone he truly despises or sees a Quirk that really catches his eye, he can't help but give in to his sadism and waste effort on psychologically torturing his opponents. His ego and obsession with typical hero/villain narratives are so dominant that he can't bring himself to acknowledge the possibility that he could actually lose to someone besides the current holder of One For All, and his obsession with having its power drives him to take steps to preserve it, even as it becomes stronger and stronger over time and more of a threat to him.
  • Super-Empowering: Half of how he was able to build such a loyal following back in the day was his ability to give Quirks to those without them. In the present day, he largely uses this to create the Nomu. However, unlike One For All and its bearers, All For One is incapable of passing on his titular Quirk itself without outside aid.
  • Super-Senses: After he was injured by All Might, he lost most of his normal senses (he visibly has no eyes, ears, or nose), but quickly replaced them with various Quirks, such as Infrared and Vibration Detection, letting him perceive his surroundings even better than a normal person. The Vestiges of his stolen Quirks, rebelling against him blind him, and prevent him from dodging Hawks' and Tokoyami's attacks which destroy his life support mask.
  • Super-Strength: Thanks in part to having three Strength Enhancer Quirks, All For One is strong enough to hold All Might back with his bare hands alone, at one point casually tossing him aside using just the tendrils of his Rivet Stab Quirk.
  • Super-Toughness: He can tank All Might's blows with relative ease, possibly thanks to some kind of durability Quirk. He was — barely — still alive when Endeavor's point-blank Prominence Burn turned him into a crumbling charcoaled husk, enough to reap the benefits of Eri's Rewind Quirk undoing the damage.
  • Superpower Lottery: As his name implies, All For One can steal Quirks from others and wield them as his own. He can also combine the Quirks he's stolen to perform devastating attacks and can combine multiples of the same Quirk to stack their power. He can also give the Quirks he's stolen to others, and if he gives a Quirk to someone who already has one, it sometimes causes the Quirks to combine and mutate into a completely new Quirk. In a world where Everyone Is a Super, the man who can steal powers and give them to other people is king. At least until All Might beat him. It's also technically Played With, as on its own merits, without any other quirks to leech from and manipulate, All For One cannot do anything by itself and is technically one of the weakest Quirks out there when judged on its own abilities. When Star and Stripe booby-traps New Order with a rule that allows it to 'revolt against other Quirks', allowing it to fight back within All For One's vestige world against his one-sided absorption of it, despite All For One's entire power being based around controlling and subjugating Quirks for his own use, he's completely helpless in a straight-forward fight between their respective powers, and can only cravenly look for the nearest host to offload New Order onto to stop the attack, rather than being able to defeat Star himself.
  • The Svengali: He groomed Shigaraki to carry out his will as well as to personally insult All Might and Nana Shimura.

    T-Z 
  • Tailor-Made Prison: After All Might beats him the second time, he's put in one. He's kept in straitjacket on a chair, with multiple automated guns ready to shoot the moment he makes suspicious movement or activates his Quirk.
  • Take Over the World: To no one's surprise, this is what All For One ultimately wants to do in the absolute worst way possible. Crosses over with his Devil Complex and status as a Dark Messiah.
  • Taking You with Me: After taking a full power Prominence Burn from Endeavor and nearly being reduced to ashes, All For One admits he's pretty much dead, but decides if he's dying anyway, he might as well 'try something out.' Namely, a copy of Eri's Rewind Quirk reverse engineered from the Quirk-Destroying bullets to restore himself. He flat out admits this will be fatal regardless but is beyond caring.
  • Talking Is a Free Action:
    • Played With. He tends to favor Quirks or attacks that are effective from a distance, allowing him the freedom to engage in a verbal beatdown of his opponents as they try to get close to him in order to agitate his opponents and make them lose focus, allowing him to press the advantage whilst using his multiple abilities to securely defend himself. However, he is regularly attacked and sometimes cut off mid-taunt by his opponents, especially when All Might had truly had enough of his endless insults, but even then, he always keeps a clear focus on pressing his psychological advantage against his enemies even if they do land some hard blows upon him.
    • Deconstructed, as he's so used to being able to this method that when he's on a time limit thanks to a copy of Eri's Rewind, he keeps doing this whenever his Berserk Buttons are pressed too hard. This ends up burning up his remaining time without him really being able to do much with it.
  • Targeted to Hurt the Hero: This is his favorite tactic for inflicting psychological damage on his opponents.
    • Nana Shimura went to the extreme of cutting ties with her son Kotaro and putting him into foster care to avoid this happening, despite the clear anguish it caused both of them, aware All For One would relentlessly focus on him as a weakness of hers as she chose to face him. Nana's fears proved to be utterly Justified. All For One manipulated her grandson Tomura into becoming a hate-filled villain in defiance of his heroic lineage. Even being dead didn't stop him from taking this further, as he recovered Nana's corpse and preserved it for later use.
    • He's ecstatic when he finally breaks out of Tartarus and is free to turn his attention towards Izuku, aware that between his youth and kind nature pulling this off against him will be easy, as simply attacking anybody around Izuku in ways he's powerless to prevent will lead to him blaming himself for their suffering. All For One plays up the angle that One For All is the only power that can truly challenge him, but Izuku is an Inadequate Inheritor who can only waste its immense potential in his hands, grinding down Izuku's spirit because of his Chronic Hero Syndrome and belief that he must end the fighting by beating All For One himself.
    • He doesn't limit this attitude just to the holders of One For All, but extends it to every hero he encounters. He deliberately targets civilians to mock their practice of protecting others at their own expense. He makes it clear that he and his side will not stop until they have torn down everything the heroes are trying to protect.
      All For One: Heroes are those who defend, whilst villains violate. Behold, as we plunge headlong towards our dreams!!
    • His final attempt to do this towards Izuku using a prone and broken All Might is intentionally exploited by his Arch-Enemy, as it allows him to use his final remaining support item close-range on the pair of them when All For One is Out of Continues.
  • That Man Is Dead: An exceptionally rare instance of not saying it for himself, but on behalf of Shigaraki due to his attempted Split-Personality Merge with him. He is so narcissistic that his vestige tries to speak for Shigaraki while in his body and insist the young man is well and truly gone. Mirio calls him out on his bluff immediately, prompting Izuku to deliver a Curb-Stomp Battle that further tears apart their merger.
  • They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: In his prime form, he can be seen as relatively ordinary-looking, once he rewinds to his prime in Chapter 363.
  • The Tape Knew You Would Say That: When the heroes raid the former hideout of the Creature Rejection Clan due to having been given vital information from Lady Nagant the heroes find themselves an empty mansion and a tape recording All For One left behind. The recording had him applaud Deku indirectly and mock him for his efforts in trying to save Lady Nagant meaning All For One knew and anticipated Izuku's actions enough to leave a recording for him. He lampshades in said recording that one of his favorite hobbies is predicting and accurately reading people well ahead of time and acting in accordance to make them dance to his tune, further underlying how outmatched Izuku is in trying to combat a foe who's infinitely more experienced and cunning than him in physical and psychological warfare.
  • This Cannot Be!:
    • Downplayed, but still noticeable example. When Deku and Aoyama manage to actually trick him despite his Living Lie Detector Quirk, his inner monologue shows he has no clue how it happened and is visibly shocked. This happens again when Kurogiri's Quirk is used to warp Deku's reinforcements to his location, something he has no clue how they're doing and then sees someone other than Kurogiri is using it when it's supposedly a one of a kind artificial Quirk.
      All For One: What is the meaning of this? Not in our direct phone calls, nor in my contact with his parents, did I sense any traces of lies or ill-intent. How in the Hell...
    • He has this again when Jiro's defiance of him despite his power edge inspires the vestiges inside of him to rise up against him, wondering how this is even possible. Her and Hawks successfully shattering his apparently unbreakable Cool Mask with a Vibroweapon move exposes his expression of sheer shock and disbelief underneath, visible even with his lack of a full face. This swiftly turns to anger and a spiteful denial of his unfavorable position after Tokoyami follows up on that by breaking the rest of his mask to smithereens, violently suppressing his rebelling Quirks and attacking the heroes with everything he's got to regain control of the fight.
    • The vestige All For One is shocked when Mirko's attacks actually start staggering Tomura's body, despite his almost impervious toughness. He quickly realizes that Bakugou's new Dangerous Forbidden Technique somehow managed to leave lasting damage and weakened him somehow, despite all the effort he's put into ensuring Tomura would be an all-powerful being unchallenged by anything but the accumulated power of One For All. Furthermore, he's stunned to realize that he himself felt threatened by Bakugou at that moment, struggling to accept that a 'random background extra' could elicit such a response from him.
    • A later conversation with Hawks as well as his internal monologues implies that at his core, All For One is so narcissistic that he simply can't comprehend the possibility he might genuinely suffer an actual loss or set back, or bare to admit he did if there's some excuse he can make to avoid it. As such, his default reaction to any set back or loss he suffers is disbelief it could happen at all.
  • Too Clever by Half: One of All For One's biggest weaknesses is while he is extremely competent a planner and can puppet things very effectively, he believes he's impossible to fool and at least one of his schemes will succeed no matter what. He's also not very good at adapting to other people's character growth and pretty much incapable of predicting it but is oblivious to this flaw. As a result, the heroes' plan to lure him into a trap actually succeeding takes him entirely off guard and he doesn't even understand how it happened.
  • To Create a Playground for Evil: According to Aoyama, this is at least part of his endgame: spread social instability and anarchy to increase villain activity and create a world where every nation is struggling to survive, then use his amassed Quirks to take advantage and take over. All For One admits it's not completely accurate, but close enough.
  • Took a Level in Badass: As he self-desires to be an "invincible Demon Lord", his overarching goal throughout the series is to self-invoke this on himself after his defeat to All Might, coming back more powerful than ever before to nullify the chance of any defeat in the future.
    • He plans to do this through Tomura by turning him into the 'perfect Demon Lord', becoming physically strong enough to handle the full scope of his stockpiled Quirks and motivated enough through sheer hatred that the vestige of himself attached to his original Quirk can subsume Tomura's personality and effectively be 'reborn' into a stronger body that can additionally channel enough emotional willpower to overcome One For All, becoming otherwise unbeatable as a result. He even considers his original body and self as an Expendable Clone compared to this version of himself, as said 'vessel' is incapable of achieving his desires anymore.
    • When his original self is fatally injured fighting Endeavour, he activates Eri's Rewind Quirk to undo the damage in lieu of a proper Healing Factor, which additionally also reverts him back to the prime of health before he suffered his Game-Breaking Injury and enables him to unleash more strength than he could before with his damaged body. Additionally, the energy also renders him effectively invulnerable, restoring his body even from getting smashed into pieces, with the only downside being that it will inevitably subject him to Death by De-aging. Thanks to his lengthy lifespan however, this works as an Hour of Power, and his Psychic Link to Tomura even allows him to unleash levels of power that physically destroy his body before Rewind undoes the damage. However, Hawks also notes that the energy also renders any Heteromorph-type Quirks All For One possesses into an infantile state, limiting his available Quirks to use.
  • Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: A variant. When he fights the American heroine, Star and Stripe, he succeeds in managing to kill her and take her Quirk, New Order. But before he did, she placed one more order for her Quirk: to rebel against all Quirks. As soon as he absorbed it, New Order starts to destroy his Quirks and tear up his body from the inside and he soon frantically tries to get rid of it before it kills him completely.
  • Touch of Death: His ability to steal Quirks is basically this, as it's basically an Instant-Win Condition against an opponent with a Quirk. Deconstructed, as it's repeatedly shown his reliance on this has left him at a loss of what to do against an opponent who it doesn't work on and with abyssmal close combat skills.
  • Tough Love: He locked his brother in a safe when he wouldn't join him and forced a stockpiling Quirk upon him to convince him to join him. He might have been manipulating Yoichi out of his pure ego but in All For One's eyes he was also helping Yoichi become stronger even though he had to be rough and abusive with him. This backfired as it led to the birth of the power that would cause his downfall: One For All. Though it must be mentioned that the younger one was opposing him at that time, so it's unknown how he would've reacted if the younger one joined him or tried to find a middle ground.
  • Troll: All For One truly is a Classic Villain and extremely intimidating, so much so that he induces visions of death in most who cross paths with him. Yet he's also a smug, taunting jackass whose greatest power isn't even his ability to steal Quirks but rather how he gets under his opponent's skin, and it's evidently his greatest joy in life. He's close to breaking out into a jig when he realizes his new main target is Izuku. He even states outright that he defines how successful one is as a villain by how reviled they are by others, and his grand ambition since childhood has been to elevate himself to being somebody universally Hated by All across the world.
  • The Unapologetic: He knows he's evil and that everything he does causes death and destruction. He just thinks it's really cool being the bad guy. He even goes the extra mile of flaunting this attitude and rubbing it in the faces of everybody who faces him, especially if they have personal beef with him, just to upset them and get under their skin. He even gloats that he's so proud of his despicableness because it inspires rejection and animosity from others, as he considers that the hallmark by which a successful villain is measured, and even expressed sincere worry when he mistakenly thought the vestiges who haunted his dreams were a sign that he could regret his actions.
  • Uncertain Doom: The vestige of himself containing his consciousness is viscerally ripped apart from within by Tomura when he re-asserts control over himself, leaving All For one's mental avatar in pieces. It's unclear if this violent takeover destroyed the vestige portion of All For One completely, but it certainly left it incapable of further controlling Tomura anymore. To a lesser extent, the original body of All For One exists in this state thanks to the combination of Eri's Rewind interacting with his extended lifespan. Not even he knows when his remaining time will run out and he will cease to exist, informing his haste to secure victory with his 'Next Me' before the inevitable happens.
  • Underestimating Badassery:
    • All For One's such an egomaniac that he has difficulty truly seeing anyone as a genuine threat. He's pretty much written off Izuku as a threat, confident he'll be able to kill him before he reaches his potential. Hawks points out that, being The psychopath, All For One is fundamentally incapable of being emotionally invested in things like a normal person.
    • His Vestige inside of Tomura shares this flaw, seeing the heroes who aren't Izuku as little more than distractions. As with the original All For One, this causes him to leave himself open to attacks that he easily could have avoided and taking his eyes off of the heroes.
  • The Unfettered: Just as All Might is The Fettered, All For One is the complete opposite. There is very little, All For One wouldn't do in order to succeed in his goals. Humiliating the Hero Society is but a cherry on the cake of evil, he has installed. Even if he was to fail, Tomura will continue his legacy anyway. A brilliant masterstroke in his eyes.
  • Unskilled, but Strong:
    • In contrast to All Might, who trained for years to learn how to master his Quirk, All For One is not a refined fighter and his fighting style basically boils down to "mash together a bunch of powerful Quirks, blast the enemy and hope they die in one hit". That said, the incredibly clever and out-of-the-box ways he can learn to combine stolen Quirks show that this is still a very, very bad thing. This also serves as a thematic element to their final fight; All For One values strength and raw power, hoarding it for himself, while All Might gave up his power but is using the remaining shards of it to fight him.
    • All For One even cites this as the reason why he doesn't want Best Jeanist's Fiber Master Quirk: Taking someone like Best Jeanist's Quirk, where most of the power comes from years of training and intimate knowledge of what it can and can't do, is much less attractive to him since he won't be able to use it to its full potential right off the bat, versus an unsubtle but powerful Quirk like super strength. Plus, he plans to pass down (correction: had passed on)note All For One to Shigaraki and feels a Quirk like Fiber Master wouldn't mesh well with his student's personality.
    • All For One doesn't seem to have much skill, if any, in hand-to-hand combat. As a result, the few melee attacks he actually makes tend to be huge power attacks with no real technique behind them. The one time he tried to go for a Finishing Move close-range was mainly a ploy to gambit All Might into using his remaining strength for him to reflect upon him with Impact Recoil, showing that All For One never fights up close unless he has some advantage he can press. Even then, he has no answer for All Might's counter except to try and charge up a powered-up Air Cannon and being left wide open as a result. When Endeavor grapples with him close-range, All For One's only response is to try and steal his Quirk rather than attack him, and once his hands are scorched, he has no response to answer to Endeavor incinerating him despite the former lacking an arm at that point. He mentally admits that his busted life-support mask means that his body is shutting down and won't respond to him anymore, but it's still notable that he was unable to fight off an injured one-armed man despite his immense power.
    • To finally defeat his enemies at Gunga, All For One's frustration with his worsening situation eventually makes him hit a Rage Breaking Point that he then channels into his Quirks to overpower them. In contrast to Tomura having mastered The Power of Hate to precisely control Decay enough to avoid damaging targets nearby him even whilst crumbling a city to dust, All For One's own usage of the tactic comes down to self-detonating his limbs with massive amounts of force aimed vaguely at the heroes, being reliant on Rewind to make sure the damage isn't fatal to him, and he admits unfamiliarity with the feeling of pure anger, believing it to be a result of his Psychic Link to Tomura rather than an ability he could always use.
    • All Might exploits this when he uses his Powered Armor to stall him: he knows All For One is very unused to actually having to worry about a close quarters fight at all, so he makes sure to get into melee and keep him there as soon as possible.
  • Unperson: Whilst initially he was presented as an unquantifiable figure of menace with unclear goals, powers and no stated personality beyond being Japan's old Shadow Dictator seeking to make a comeback, as time goes on, the narrative gradually strips away the aura of grandeur he cultivates to reveal that behind the mask of the imposing villain, there's not much more to him.
    • Due to his age and secretive nature, not to mention his near-death at All Might's hands and needing to recover in the shadows for his comeback, the number of people who know about him towards the start of the series could be counted in the single digits, and even they aren't aware of who he was prior to the supervillian identity of AFO. His past identity has been so effectively erased by the passage of time, not to mention his own selfish nature leading him to accumulate power and resources for his own use, rather than attempting to leave a legacy, that once All Might destroyed both his empire and his body there was basically nothing left. His own name has been so thoroughly forgotten that All Might didn't make the connection to him when he christened Tomura with his own last name of 'Shigaraki', and it's clear that he has no 'normal' life outside his villain schemes and plans.
    • Star and Stripe tauntingly refers to him as a 'John Doe' when mocking him about how the will of a hero will always be passed down as long as people will save each other, and someday, somebody with that will shall put an end to him. All Might later theorizes that the original All For One avoided facing Star himself because he would have recognized the term 'All For One' as his own name, rather than his Quirk's, and thus been vulnerable to New Order's rules, showing again how his villain identity has utterly consumed his original self. His own 'inherited will' to Tomura is eventually torn apart and destroyed to monopolizes his Quirk for his protégé's use, free of his interference, highlighting how he ultimately failed to create a true legacy.
    • Inasa accidentally taunts him with this when he starts mocking the younger heroes that their defiance of him is simply due to ignorance of how fearsome he is, by confirming he's absolutely right: they don't know who he is. The history books of his reign don't mention him at all, and once All Might defeated him, everybody who knew about him refused to speak about him because of how vile he was, leaving him a nobody to the present generation.
  • Villains Act, Heroes React: Deconstructed: All For One is used to being the one who controls everything and the heroes having to react, allowing him to plan for what they're going to do. And for most of the series, he's right...but that leaves him assured everything will always go this way. He's kept completely off guard when the heroes subvert this by having come up with a complex, multilayered plan and it's All For One who can only react to what's happening, as all his plans have been left in shambles. Because he's so used to being the puppetmaster controlling everything, All For One can't react properly.
  • Villain Forgot to Level Grind: The cruel irony behind this trope is that All For One tries desparately to avert it, realizing his body is too weak to keep up with Quirk singularity. To do this, he has Shigaraki undergo a bunch of Character Development and Level Grinding instead to then inhabit his body and soul full time and rule the world. Yet the issue is that All For One takes zero effort to ever train by himself or adequately reflect on his personal shortcomings. He keeps making the same mistakes believing that somebody else doing all the work for him means he can still reap the benefits if he twists the narrative enough. Instead, his lack of humility earns him a full blown Humiliation Conga which triggers multiple full-blown meltdowns, showing he's just a Psychopathic Manchild who got lucky with his Quirk and ended up with a God complex as a result.
  • Villain Teleportation: Like Kurogiri, he has a "Warping" Quirk that lets him produce a black liquid that teleports people place to place. However, it's a relatively new Quirk and it has several drawbacks. One, he can only warp things to and from his current location and not to specific coordinates, though with focus, he can warp matter to and from someone he has a close relationship with, like Shigaraki. The heroes realize that it's considerably worse than Kurogiri's, having far shorter range and he can't teleport himself.
  • Villainous Breakdown: Suffers several of these over the course of the series' final arcs as the heroes begin turning the tables on him.
    • The All For One vestige inside Shigaraki has one in Chapter 333 after stealing Star and Stripe's Quirk only to find out it has been ordered to rebel. He desperately tries to find someone to transfer New Order into before it destroys him. The chapter ends with All for One damning the specter of All Might that Star represents.
      All For One: DAMN YOU, SPECTER OF ALL MIGHT!!!
    • After slowly losing his composure as the heroes gain more victories against him, it all comes to a head when Tokoyami's attack shatters his mask entirely, causing All For One to completely snap. His outward composure completely fails, resulting in him screaming at the heroes and his inner self devolving into a beast. When Endeavor returns to the fight All For One's demeanor shifts straight into panic and eventually begs for mercy as he realizes there's nothing he can do to stop burning him alive.
    • As Izuku hands his ass to him, the All For One vestige within Tomura starts ranting about how unfair it is that he is unable to use his Quirks. He ironically sounds like just as much of a Spoiled Brat as Tomura was at the beginning.
      All For One: Giving everything you've got you say?! And that business about Quirks?! Surely you jest! I haven't used a single Quirk yet! I've yet to brandish the true value of this body! They're to blame. Wretched, unsightly Eraser Head and his merry brats! And this tomb of theirs. Their sneaky, ramshackle ploy to divide us. The whole sequence of events that led to this moment...
    • His vestige is practically frothing at the mouth over Lady Nagant's intervention in the final battle, screaming like a petulant child who's lost his favorite toy and demanding Kurogiri warp him to his real self to reassert control over Shigaraki. It doesn't work and Shigaraki tears his vestige apart from the mouth down.
      All For One: THAT DISPOSABLE TRASH!! After murdering her fellow heroes, she plays the victim like some noble agent of justice?! She's just a pathetic pushover, drifting whichever way the wind blows. (...) KUROGIRI!! I'm not in control of this body! Stop gawking and warp me to All For One this instant!
    • A subtle example throughout the entire final arc is his manner of speaking. All For One generally has a dignified Evil Overlord persona, but once things stop going his way, his manner of speaking begins to slip into more childish, frustrated territory with increasing frequency, showing that no matter how hard he tries to regain his composure, he's seething beneath the surface.
    • By the time he's confronted with All Might, what composure and Mask of Sanity he had left is completely gone. His normal smirk is replaced with a completely psychotic and unhinged expressions and Creepy Shadowed Undereyes. His normal mocking confidence has also given way to him screaming all of his dialog and even the font being distorted.
    All For One: What are you SMILING ABOUT?!
  • Villainous Friendship: He's shown to have this with Dr. Garaki, having been shown to treat the Doctor as an equal and in one flashback being considerate enough to hold an umbrella for his much shorter subordinate during a rainy night. He even thanks the doctor from the bottom of his heart, going so far as to call him his friend. This is especially notable considering hows he treats everyone else as lesser beings at worst, and extensions of himself, like Shigaraki and Yoichi, at best.
  • Villains Never Lie: As manipulative as he is, All For One has not once lied to anyone, even his enemies and especially if it concerns an Awful Truth, simply out of delight with them trying to deny the awful revelations whilst he's being completely honest and forthright with them. When he tells All Might of Tomura's true lineage, the latter accuses him of lying, but All For One retorts that it is the truth and it is something he would do. Lady Nagant was convinced to aid him in capturing Izuku because of this, out of her sheer disillusionment with the Hero system after all the Dirty Business she performed over the years for it and sick of all the lies that were fed to the public, but unfortunately for her, 'doesn't lie' does not mean All For One still isn't manipulative, deceitful and callous towards others. However, if he's desperate, he will resort to bold-faced lies in order to keep any kind of advantage he can, such as denying that any part of Tomura's psyche remains after their Split-Personality Merge to demoralise Izuku and dash his hopes of 'saving' Tomura from him, whilst the visual imagery makes it clear his vestige self is still struggling for control with Tomura's remaining consciousness within himself.
  • Villains Want Mercy: Displays his cowardice by begging Endeavor not to roast him alive at the crux of their battle. Endeavor wisely doesn't listen. Though it ends up all for naught anyway, as All For One uses his copy of Rewind to temporarily restore himself back to his prime and take out as many villains as he can for Shigaraki's sake. Or rather, his own sake.
  • Villain Protagonist: Invoked: All For One believes the world revolves around him, outright saying that it's the story of how he became the greatest demon king after wishing to become an all powerful demon king like the villain of a manga. This highlights his contrasts to Izuku, the actual protagonist of the manga who narrates the same thing about becoming the greatest hero at the start.
    All For One: This will be the story of how I become the greatest demon lord of all!
  • Villain with Good Publicity: In the past, he was seen as a hero due to his stealing the Quirks of those who victimized others. This turned out to just be a ploy for him to attract loyal followers.
  • Villain Override: Attempted on Shigaraki once he'd taken the All For One Quirk. His seemingly single minded drive to steal the One For All and the way he impulsively referred to Midoriya as "little brother" implied All For One was influencing him. That said, Shigaraki himself started resisting this influence. In Chapter 285, his lingering consciousness takes control of Shigaraki's body to save him from a surprise attack from Endeavor. In Chapter 295, All For One completely takes over Shigaraki's body and uses that opportunity to escape from the Heroes with the Near High-End Nomus.
  • Voice with an Internet Connection: Initially, he appears in the story through a bright computer monitor.
  • Weaponized Teleportation: During his fight with All Might, he uses a warping Quirk to teleport Gran Torino into the path of All Might's attack like a human shield.
  • What Is This Feeling?: When the heroes are actually winning against him despite his best efforts, he apparently hits his Rage Breaking Point and directly channels his spiteful anger towards them into powering up his Quirks to the point they visibly damage his physical body, which gets fixed by Rewind. Befitting his psychopathic nature, he expresses unfamiliarity with the sensation and attributes it so his Psychic Link with his "other self" allowing him to feel deep-seated rage for once.
  • White Hair, Black Heart: In the past, All For One had white hair and he's definitely one of the most evil characters in the story.
  • Why Can't I Hate You?: Surprisingly enough, for all his twisted actions, All For One appears to not actually hate anyone due to his psychopathy. Hawks speculates that the entire reason he took on Tomura was because he himself lacks the hatred necessary to steal One For All.
  • Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: All For One's obsession with possessing the one Quirk that remains ever-defiant of his control means he'd rather invest exhaustive amounts of time and effort into finding a way to subdue it rather than destroy it.
  • Why Won't You Die?: It's implied this trope has become his personal Trauma Button, and whenever he's facing a tenacious hero that keeps fighting back regardless of the odds, determined to defeat/kill him no matter what, he muses on his near-fatal defeat at All Might's hands and how 'wounded heroes are the scariest'. He outright says he suffered nightmares about All Might tenaciously pursuing him with his guts hanging out, with it being implied that he let his guard down after landing what he thought was a victory blow and still struggles to deal with how the tables turned against him in an instant, which informs his cautious attitude when facing opponents that can seriously pressure him. He never fights fair and attempts to stack the deck against his opponent as much as he can to ensure the chances of a similar surprise loss are as minimal as possible.
  • With Great Power Comes Great Perks: This, paired with Lack of Empathy pretty much forms All For One's reason to become a supervillain.
  • With My Hands Tied: As their final fight continues, All For One taunts All might that he's well aware of his victory conditions, and so he won't both using all his power to destroy a Quirkless opponent like him, calling it using "power-saver mode" against him. When he attacks All Might with gigantic fleshy constructs that literally eat through entire buildings to get at him, the former number one accuses him of lying, only for All For One to refute that statement. Awe-inspiring as the devastating attacks are, they're really nothing much to All for One with him rewound back to the prime of health.
  • Windows of the Soul: Inverted. Befitting somebody with such a twisted, heartless, and self-centred nature, when the reader is first introduced to him, he no longer has them, which leads to his unsettling and foreboding appearance. His eyes have only been seen twice, in flashback to him killing Nana Shimura, and during Izuku's vision of the past of OFA (and fittingly enough, they look dead and empty, reflecting the heart of their owner). Otherwise, all his appearances in flashbacks whenever he still possessed a face have the upper half of his face shadowed to obscure his eyes. As Tomura's Split-Personality Merge with All For One's vestige continues, he starts showing the same dead eyes by the time of the Final Battle, a sign that All For One is getting closer to successfully merging their psyches and personalities together into his 'Perfected Demon lord' self. Tomura's eyes even briefly regain their pupils when his 'Tenko Shimura' personality briefly surfaces, showing how his eyes are reflective of which one of them is commanding the body in their mixed state.
  • The Worf Effect: Discussed. When Jiro and Tokoyami step in to aid Hawks during his fight once All For One incapacitates Endeavor, he calls them the "gnats that swarm around One For All", and mockingly notes that the situation reminds him of the comic books he used to read, where 'jobber characters' existed only to die at the hands of the demon lord and showcase his power. Jiro tells him to save that line until he's actually beaten them. Turns out, she was right and he finds out he spoke too soon.
  • World's Strongest Man: His Quirk is the most powerful one in the series. All For One himself remained unchallenged for over a century until the advent of All Might. By the present day however, the fact his wounds and crippling at All Might's hands mean that he no longer is this, informs much of the plot. All For one embarks on a complex scheme to turn Tomura into his literal 'next me' in preparation for gaining the ability to claim his former strength and more through the body of a younger, more physically- enhanced individual capable of withstanding the strain of his accumulated abilities without risk of a Superpower Meltdown, along with the capacity to finally absorb One For All, the only power that can challenge his reign, and finally succeed in claiming the role for good as a near god-like being that will then Take Over the World. He even becomes dismissive of his weakened original self after this plan is underway, considering (or at least wanting himself and the heroes to think he does) his old body fully expendable once it became incapable of achieving his ambitions.
  • Worth It: The Final Battle illustrates that there are three things that All For One will devote every means at his disposal to achieving, no matter the extensive time required, the unethical means, or how short-sighted they may prove to be in the long term.
    • Finally suceeding in subduing his brother's long-resistant Quirk One For All and making it part of his collection. This is in part out of his twisted obsession with proving the villain can win in reality as well as utilising the Quirk's Super-Empowering trait for his own benefit to further increase his accumulated power to God-Emperor levels. This obsession with having the Quirk at all costs sees him being unwilling to actually kill any of the holders so long as they possess it and he's not ready to absorb it yet, allowing it to gradually become stronger in opposition to him and preventing any lethal harm being directed at Izuku during the clash.
    • Becoming an immortal Demon king who rules over all other villains by virtue of being Hated by All, heroes, civilians and his fellow villains alike, and does nothing but make the existence of everybody miserable around him. This is because he sincerely believes that the animosity directed towards a person is a status symbol of their villainy, and he wants himself to be a universally-recognised top villain. Even when this ultimately results in him making enemies out of his allies like Gigantomachia, he arrogantly believes his sheer power will always enable himself to triumph over any attempted opposition.
    • Never, ever, losing. All For One can take a temporary defeat as long as it's in service to his grander overarching victory in the long-term, but anything that threatens to genuinely inflict a loss upon himself that he can't downplay or pretend it didn't count will push him to an uncharacteristically furious countenance, resulting in him lashing out more ferociously than before, and numerous times he seizes an advantage against the heroes because he'd made extensive preparations prior to the fighting to cover even the unlikeliest of scenarios and cement his victory. To avoid losing to All Might a third time, he voluntarily forced out every drop of blood in his body to undo a certain defeat, illustrating his commitment to ensuring his victory. This extends to even minor issues like being incapable of accepting he's wrong in his opinion when arguing with others, or factoring in an actual genuine defeat for himself, such as his vestige counterpart losing the mental struggle against Tomura.
  • Worthy Opponent: Generally Zigzagged all over the place. All For One is capable of acknowledging the heroes who oppose him as skilled and talented in their own right, but he considers himself an existence far beyond ordinary humans. He looks upon people mainly as a container for their Quirks, and is implied to be more intrigued with their powers than the people who hold them.
    • All For One is obsessed with the One For All Quirk. His desire to possess — but not destroy —it informs many of his plans. He seems to relish the genuine challenge it provides him time and again in forcing him to go to extensive lengths to finally claim it, and his dialogue implies that he considers the Quirk itself his true Arch-Enemy, rather than any one holder.
    • He is derisive and spitefully mocking towards Toshinori Yagi, considering him a weakened and useless oaf after he passed on his Quirk to Izuku. But he also expresses a backhanded respect of All Might, the Symbol of Peace. He admits that he has traumatic memories of his disfigurement at his hands with almost sincere admiration for his tenacity in seizing victory against him and his plans for Tomura were focused around creating him into a powerful Symbol of Fear specifically to counter the influence All Might had made on society.
    • All For One is determined to steal One For All from Izuku as soon as possible. Part of his urgency seems to be rooted in his acknowledgement that Izuku's full power is a dangerous threat to his ambitions, even in the hands of an untrained child. He is going out of his way to relentlessly demoralize him in body and spirit at every opportunity.
    • It transpires that he's willing to acknowledge individuals like them in a backhanded way as this, but only as a taunt whenever he's facing 'lesser' heroes trying to fight him in a group. He mocked the heroes playing backup to All Might at Kamino Ward as their 'audience', telling them to shut up and let the fight between them play out, and likewise mocks the heroes for attacking him en masse at Gunga mountain as a desperate move. Despite him being heavily wounded and barely standing, he called Endeavour the 'only one who could stand up to him' amongst the heroes after he nearly/did kill him, believing their efforts useless without his aid. This is another aspect of his massive ego, as it's more 'appropriate' for the Demon lord to struggle against powerful individuals, but not mere 'side characters', which contributes to his multiple cases of Underestimating Badassery, constantly misguiding his opponents based on his comic-book belief that he only has one true opponent.
    • This gets Inverted against him by All Might during their (second) final bout, as All Might goads him into the pointless battle by mocking him about how, even rewound to the prime of his youth and with greater power then before, All For one's piss-poor performance as a fighter makes him an unworthy opponent for the Quirkless All Might, beating him skilfully with support items instead whilst laughing about how he planned to become the "Demon Lord" despite being so incompetent.
  • Would Hurt a Child: The manga does not shy away from highlighting his ruthlessness against its main child protagonists, especially given his extreme age and experience advantage over them.
    • Implied: In the Volume 7 omake, Horikoshi's (self-proclaimed) "oblique hint" that the Winged Nomu killed by Stain had grabbed Midoriya specifically was just a drawing of Tsubasa, a boy with wings seen alongside Bakugo from the first chapter. This implies that at one time between then and the Field Training Arc, All For One somehow got hold of Tsubasa and turned him into a Nomu.
    • After he escapes from Tartarus, he makes it extremely clear that his focus is now on Izuku, and that he intends to devote as much time, resources, and disposable pawns as it takes in order to break him, including killing his friends if necessary.
      • When he finally makes his move to steal One For All for good, he plans to use Izuku's trust in his allies to lure him to an isolated area. He not only confronts him in person but summons every ally he has on his side just to attack a lone teenager, it being clear that Izuku wasn't going to survive such an attack no matter how strong he'd become. This thankfully backfires magnificently when Izuku and Aoyama summon The Cavalry, giving them the element of surprise and gathering their enemies all in one place to end their reign of terror permanently.
    • When Jiro and Tokoyami step in to cover Hawks during the Final Battle once All For One downs Endeavor with a massive gash in his torso, the pro hero frantically tells them to flee the fight, yelling that All For One is way out of their league power wise and he will slaughter them without remorse.
    • The vestige of himself merged into Tomura's psyche makes it clear that he's focused on killing Bakugou as painfully as possible to break Izuku's Heroic Willpower with his mangled corpse. He eventually succeeds in putting him down when a blow to his chest causes an internal detonation from his Quirk that blows his heart to pieces.
    • His grooming of Tenko and turning him into Tomura also qualifies, as he kept the boy stewing in his hatred with the express intent of using him as his own personal Soul Jar. Any chance Tenko had at a normal life was taken from him the second All For One found him.
  • Wrong Genre Savvy: Played With. It's actually because he's Genre Savvy that he falls into this, All For One having read a lot of superhero comic books in his youth and having the time of his life turning the 'fantasy into reality' by using his powers to become a real-life supervillain. However, his same love of, and intimate understanding of the same tropes from the comics mean that he now believes the world they're in ascribes to the same rules of superhero comic books, and that he cannot be meaningfully challenged or defeated by anybody that isn't a holder of One For All. Instead, during the Final Battle he is paired up against 'extra' characters who manage to severely inconvenience him and even damage his life-support mask, because the world he's in ascribes to realistic outcomes, thus there is no narrative Plot Armor that will guarantee his defeat won't come about from a bunch of 'side characters' instead, and his belief this was the case lead him to underestimate the threat they posed.
  • Xanatos Speed Chess:
    • Something of a specialty of his. All For One's long life grants him the time to cultivate multiple contingencies for every possible circumstance, and pawns who can carry them out. Sometimes they work, sometimes they fail. But he always keeps all of them in effect in some way or another until he has no further need for them. On a grand scale, his scheme to steal One For All is the foremost example of this as it's hinted he's initiated his strategies to culminate at a time when Izuku is nowhere near ready to handle them. All For One could've waited another five years for Tomura to better develop into his 'Next Me' with a greater synchronization between them, but All Might transferring his power forced his hand. By then Izuku would be too strong and confident to risk it. Thus, Izuku's being targeted when he's the most vulnerable to having One For All stolen from him.
      All For One: Listen well... When I find myself with a goal, I'm sure to plan out a number of... routes to the goal, shall we say. To be exact, I weave my plots years or even decades prior so that I may employ a viable route when the time comes. A route that inevitably achieves my ends.
    • Deconstructed in the final arc: All For One is very good at coming up with backup plans for his schemes and adapting to x-factors if he has time to react...but he has zero capacity to come up with plans on the fly in the heat of the moment precisely because he's so used to his plans working as he predicted. Taking him off guard was partially possible because All For One genuinely believed he'd planned for everything, and they just let him keep thinking that. When the heroes take him off guard and all his backup plans are countered, All For One can only throw angry, frustrated attempts at psychological warfare at Endeavor without his usual smug confidence or any actual way to turn things around. The Vestige of him inside Tomura has no real response to learning his and Tomura's Fusion Dance wasn't as complete as he'd believed outside of 'try to just do what I was doing faster' and trying to ignore the other heroes instead of seeing them as a threat.
  • You Are Too Late:
    • He arrives to the final confrontation believing that he's the one springing the trap. As Izuku points out, All For One thinks he'd be invoking this on anyone trying to help him because Search shows everyone is miles away...but it's the other way around: it's too late for All For One because the heroes' trap sprung the moment he appeared in person.
    • As the situation keeps turning worse and worse for him, culminating in his original body being forced to temporarily stave off getting killed through Eri's Rewind, he consoles himself that as long as he can get his original self back to UA and help his 'Next Me' assimilate One for All, he'll still ultimately win in the end. Shortly afterwards, the damage Izuku has done to Tomura's enhanced body enables him to forcibly re-assert control from All For One's vestige, violently ripping it apart along with his master's consciousness. Furthermore, he makes it clear that he has no intention of letting his Master use his never-ending hatred for the world as his personal weapon, and fully intends to destroy both Izuku and One For All completely to assert his own will. All For One's centuries-long plan to steal his brother's Quirk has become an impossibility, and his remaining self is completely unaware of it.
  • You Could Have Used Your Powers for Good!: All Might confronts him about this after he's imprisoned in Tartarus. He questions him about all the death and misery he'd caused over the generations, asking him point-plank Was It Really Worth It? after he'd apparently been defeated for good in the end, wanting to know what All For One wanted to achieve with all the power and control he tried to amass when he could have instead used the time and abilities he'd been given to help others. All For One mocks him that the conversation isn't a productive one, as All Might wouldn't be able to understand his motives even if he told him. He admits that the reason he did everything was simply because he wanted to be the Lord of Evil. He had the power to achieve his dreams and put all his efforts into achieving it because he could. All For One even fires back that for him, he cannot comprehend All Might's own selfless drive to help others at his own expense, lampshading how incompatible their views are despite being so similar to each other.
  • You Don't Look Like You: Before confronting him in a Suit of Powered Armour, All Might ruminates that their impending clash is likely the vision Nighteye foresaw of his destined demise in the line of Duty. He realises that Nighteye called his opponent "a villain" rather than his Arch-Enemy because the Rewind energy had physically restored All For One to his youth, and his former sidekick didn't realise the young man in his vision was the Symbol of Evil himself.
  • You Have Failed Me: He causes Lady Nagant to explode after her loss to Midoriya. It's Downplayed however, as it's implied that he expected her to fail, because he didn't tell Nagant about Izuku possessing multiple Quirks. It is likely that he wanted to use that incident to mock Izuku's ideals of saving everyone.
  • You Have No Idea Who You're Dealing With: He mocks the assembled heroes with this when they finally do away with fighting him with a few Strong and Skilled heroes and start attacking en masse with every long-range Quirk they have. He specifically taunts the younger heroes amongst them that trying to defeat him despite his immense power isn't bravery, but ignorance of how fearsome and powerful he used to be during his heyday, before All Might crippled him. Isana takes the wind out of his tirade by confirming that he's absolutely correct, they don't know who he is, because his selfish and utterly amoral nature meant that history classes don't talk about him personally even as they teach the downside of the 'Dark Age of Quirks' he ruled over. Therefore, the current generation of heroes don't see him as anything more than a pathetic villain still clinging to his Glory Days, which gets under All For One's skin.
  • Your Head Asplode: Implied to be what All Might did to him in their decisive battle five years prior to chapter 1, and only survived through his stockpile of life-sustaining Quirks and Garaki's help. The only parts of his head that aren't scar tissue are his mouth and jaw, allowing him to still flash his trademark Slasher Smile.
  • Zerg Rush: Discussed and Defied. When splitting up opponents to face the remaining villains for the Final Battle, it's pointed out that despite All For One's obvious weak spot meaning that the normal tactic would have been to surround him with numbers and swarm him until he was overcome, All For One's ability means that doing so would only deprive the heroes of valuable fighters and give him a power boost at the same time. Therefore, they instead aim to fight him with the smallest number of opponents possible, but with the highest skillset to make up for that.

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