Manga / Talentless Nana

It is highly recommended that you view at least the first two episodes/chapters of Talentless Nana before continuing to read on. Major spoilers are ahead.

Who is the real enemy?

Sometime in the near future, the world is at risk of being overrun by monsters known as "Enemies of Humanity". The only hope for the world lies in the hands of the Talented, superpowered humans capable of feats that rival those of these monsters. To this end, the governments of the world have created schools to train these Talented individuals.

Nanao Nakajima is... not one of these individuals. Shy and withdrawn in the face of his showy peers, Nanao has earned himself a reputation as an ordinary, Talentless person. After his disastrous introduction declaring his intention to lead the school, Nanao has been an outcast.

Of course, most of his situation is entirely false. Nanao actually is Talented, but he hides his abilities as a precaution. Enemies of Humanity are intelligent and enigmatic. It is possible they have infiltrated the school, and as a boy with no friends, if Nanao were ever confronted by an enemy who knew his weaknesses, he would lose.

Only one other person knows all this, the new girl Nana Hiiragi. A friendly burgeoning telepath who, on her first day, bonds with Nanao over shared feelings of isolation. She insists on proving to the school how special Nanao is by nominating him as class representative. No one is interested, least of all Nanao.

However, the choice is taken out of his hands the following day, when a fight between his classmates puts Nana in danger. Nanao is forced to reveal his Talent: Power Nullification. With this revelation, Nanao gains stunning popularity and newfound confidence in his and his classmates' abilities to fight the Enemies of Humanity. With Nana at his side and his new friends at his back, there's nothing he can't do.

Except survive a fall off a cliff.

Turns out, Nana Hiiragi is nothing like what she seems. She is neither friendly nor a telepath, but rather a hardened assassin with impressive powers of observation. The truth is that monsters don't exist. In the eyes of the Talentless, the real Enemies of Humanity are the Talented themselves. Nana has been sent by them to kill every student at the school, and she will stop at nothing to achieve her goal. But this will be harder than it seems, for not every student is as easy to fool as Nanao.

Talentless Nana (originally 無能なナナ, or Munō na Nana) is a Psychological Thriller manga written by Looseboy and illustrated by Iori Furuya. The manga has been ongoing since May 2016 in Monthly Shonen Gangan. It was adapted into a 13 episode anime during Fall 2020. The anime is produced by Bridge and streamed by Funimation.

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This manga provides examples of:

• Academy of Adventure: The school the students go to is supposed to teach them fight with monsters "Enemies of Humanity", while learning how to use their talents.
• Accidental Murder: Nanao Nakajima kills two people in a moment of panic before realizing his talent has developed the ability to take lives.
• Action Girl: Nana and Fuuko.
• Adults Are Useless: The academy faculty doesn't seem to take action after Nanao's disappearance. Justified, as the faculty is deliberately left with no instructions on what to do when students disappear.
• Art Shift:
  • The characters are briefly drawn in a simplistic, cartoony style during the goofy and comedic moments.
  • When Nana and Kyouka are having their monologues, the screen receives pink and blue filters respectively over black shadowing.
• Asshole Victim: Most of the people Nana kills are shown as being terrible and were abusing their abilities for their personal gain, with the exception of some like Nanao and Yōhei who were trying to be legitimately heroic with their Talents and capabilities.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Nana convinces others she can read minds by being perceptive, and defeats multiple talented by noticing inconsistencies in their claims or situations where they don’t exploit their talents in order to deduce their limitations and weaknesses. Meanwhile, Kyouya is capable of noticing tiny details and contradictions in Nana's cover stories and even came close to outing her if only he had more proof.
• Awful Truth: The real reason the Talented are persecuted is not because of of their superpowers (although they can be dangerous in the wrong hands)— it's because the Talented will all mutate into terrifyingly powerful monsters as the last phase in their development. This is what their estimated kill count is for, and why Tsuruoka wants to kill the Talented.
• Ax-Crazy: Rentaro considers it a form of self-expression to carve up and kill things that others deem cute.
• Berserk Button: Nana and Nanao both are easily set off by discussion of family.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Nana puts on a sweet, Genki Girl act to win the trust of ordinary Nice Guy Nanao Nakajima before throwing him off a cliff with only an apology for dredging up his family issues as compensation for feigning friendship and budding romance in order to more easily murder him. Then Nanao returns as a major threat to all parties.
• Beware the Superman: The setting comes after five years of warring with Smug Supers who have been abusing their power for personal gain. While the world is recovering from this, the implied fear of the Talented among normal society is enough that the Talented (regardless of powers) are regularly sent off to an island to be isolated from the Talentless. The government organization is so adamant about not permitting the Talented to surpass the Talentless that they send an assassin to eliminate the Talented in the academy.
• Big "NO!": Nana lets out a particularly heartbreaking example at the end of the 13th episode, where she's mourning Michiru's sacrificing her life to revive her.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Yuuka and Hikaru both have good reputations that mask much darker sides.
• Break Her Heart to Save Her: Rentarou is hunting down Michiru and Nana steps in to save her. Michiru refuses to leave her side and run away. Cue Nana delivering a nasty "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Michiru, stating that she was never her friend in the first place. It only works for a while though.
• Break Them by Talking: Nana does this to Yuuka as part of her plan to murder her and put a stop to her zombies. She points out all the inconsistencies in Yuuka's story about her supposed date with Shinji and correctly deduces she started the fire in the movie, murdered him, then animated him in a fit of rage, jealousy, and despair.
• Car Fu:
  • Noted by Kyoya in Chapter 71 that the military patrols don't stop for anyone, not even for members of their own ranks. This nearly results in Saeki getting mowed down by them when the driver of one of these patrols deliberately speeds up while she stands in their path a few chapters later.
  • Sachiko reveals to Nana in Chapter 66 that she planned to do this to Daisuke as revenge for his Blackmail, only to have found out that she killed Takeo instead as part of his plan.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • While they're not entirely character-specific foreshadowing, if Nana overhears or observes something, she would use it to her advantage in killing her target after doing a bit of analysis.
    • When the First-Episode Twist happens, it's revealed that Nana doesn't actually have telepathy, she was just correctly predicting stuff via Awesomeness by Analysis. The minor details that allowed her to predict Nanao's history even included the cat scratches on his neck, and the expensive wristwatch that he wears.
    • Yohei's ability to time-travel leaves him physically exhausted. This played a huge role in Nana's plan of getting him to unknowingly stand on a frozen lake (which isn't frozen by Seiya the previous day), causing him to drown as he would be too tired to swim safely, even if he knew how to swim.
    • When Nana visits Kyouya's room, she noticed that the tomatoes still had expiry labels on them and the trash had been wrapped in two layers. This allows her to deduce that Kyouya's sense of smell isn't functioning normally, so her plan involves leaking gas (something that he won't smell) to create an explosion in the janitor's shack once he turned the stove on. He survives anyway because he's immortal.
    • Tsunekichi's Polaroid camera helps him take photos of the future, but only while he's asleep. Nana takes advantage of this to create a fake photograph.
  • These would also come up in Kyouya's own investigations, such as when he picked up Nanao's broken wristwatch, causing a shocked reaction from Nana, which made her even more suspicious.
• Child Soldier: Tsuruoka's pet project of training teens to assassinate the talented.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Nana was taught that leaving her window open as a child was what enabled her parents' killers to break in. She was then intentionally put in an abusive household where she was regularly reminded of her hand in her parents’ death while the government also trained her to be a killing machine who unquestioningly believed that all Talented were evil.
• De-power: In Chapter 77, Tsuruoka captures Talented in order to test a drug that can temporarily suppress Talents. This drug is produced by using Nanao's brain cells.
• Deconstruction: Of two notable story ideas.
  • Of being Hired to Hunt Yourself. Nana's classmates elect her to become class leader so she can hunt down the Enemies of Humanity who've been killing their classmates. The problem is that Nana is the murderer and she's just using the position to gather intel to make her job easier. But as the bodies start piling up, Nana can only give vague, non-conclusive answers on account of her wildly inconsistent "telepathy", leading to her classmates gradually losing faith in her abilities. Things only get more complicated when murders that aren't her fault start happening.
  • Of the Superpower Lottery and high school students wielding that power. Naturally, some are more good-natured and only want to do good things, but many are lacking proper moral empathy, and end up Jumping Off the Slippery Slope into doing horrific things just because they have the power to do so, so who's going to stop them? The island they're supposedly learning to save the world on is also blatantly more of a containment zone to help isolate and facilitate their deaths, the government clearly fears and despises them, and the sheer Moral Myopia ends up making Lord of the Flies look child-friendly by comparison. Then there's The Reveal much later in the manga that these powered individuals nearly ended the world once already as a seemingly-inevitable transformation into Eldritch Abominations, and in fact really were the Enemies to Humanity the entire time, meaning every superpowered teen is Blessed with Suck and expected to either die or kill everything around them.
• Downer Ending: Of all ways to cap the anime adaptation, the 13th episode ends with Nana hugging Michiru's dead body at the beach shortly after the latter's Sacrificial Revival Spell. Nana lets out a Big "NO!" and it all abruptly stops there.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: In order to keep even the most Talented from being too overpowered, each has restrictions on when or how they can use their talent or suffers a backlash for using it, if not both. For specific examples, see the Characters page.
• Dramatic Irony: Tsuruoka says that after Michiru resurrected Nana, her heart has stopped but her body temperature remains constant and there's a chance she can be saved. On the condition Nana continues to follow his orders, the Organization will do what they can to try to save Michiru. Then Tsuroaka shoots Michiru in her body bag, ensuring she's dead and Nana is none the wiser.
• Fan Disservice: Nana gets the brunt of this in her attempts to not get maimed and murdered by the Talented, with one case outright trying to assault her while she's partially undressed, but the story doesn't really play her for any sort of fanservice for any of it in preference of the "teens killing teens" horror element.
• First-Episode Twist: Nanao isn't the Talentless individual whom the series' title is referring to; he's just a Decoy Protagonist. The real protagonist is Nana, who then proceeds to throw him off a cliff, revealing her true nature as an assassin of the Talented.
• Foreshadowing: Many details that end up being the undoing of the Talented are clearly present or hinted at in previous panels before characters like Kyouya and Nana monologue or explain it to others. An example includes Nana buying two portable MP3 players with recording functions, so her victim would steal what they assumed was the only one.
• Friendless Background: Nearly every student on the island is said to not have had friends before coming to the school, and even then remained friendless.
• Hope Spot:
  • Nana's superior, Tsuruoka, says that Michiru may still be able to be resurrected thanks to the unknown nature of her Talent. Then, we see him shooting Michiru in her bodybag and learn he's using it as leverage for an unknowing Nana.
  • Nana manages to lock Daisuke Soma in a cell, get Moe and Sachiko to pull a Heel–Face Turn, and confess to her classmates about the government conspiracy. Unfortunately, Nanao forces Daisuke to blow himself up, allowing Tsuruoka to frame Nana for terrorism.
  • Sachiko teleports Nana back to their other classmates in order to escape Tsuruoka. Nanao brainwashes those classmates into beating Nana up and leaving her to be captured by soldiers, who then spend the next three years brainwashing her into hating the Talented again. The government and public are now fully against the Talented, leading to most of Nana's potential allies being captured as well.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Michiru is convinced of Nana’s good heart and innocence, despite seeing overt evidence that Nana is a killer.
• I Know You Know I Know: As Nana finds out that there are Talented whom she cannot easily fool, the series becomes a case of her and her targets outsmarting each other.
  • This usually happens between her and Kyouya. As he becomes even more suspicious of her actions, she creates several fake testimonies or alibis in order to throw him off her tail. This doesn't seem to work most of the time though, since Kyouya may sometimes account for the possibility of Nana lying.
  • Knowing how Tsunekichi is focused on the predicted future of him dying at exactly 10 PM via strangulation, she adjusted his wristwatch's time so that his murder would happen earlier than intended. But since he has been so wary of the time, it's revealed that Tsunekichi adjusted them back, and expected that Nana would be attacking him.
• If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: In the concentration camp, Nanao orders Nana to beat Moguo with a stun baton. Nana does so, but secretly hides a loaf of bread in Moguo's clothes to soften the impact and so the latter can feed his friend.
• Island of Mystery: The location of the school is steeped in questions. Several of the characters are only there to learn more about it and why Talented keep dying there.
• Kill the Cutie: Rentarou, the astral projector, has a fetish of hurting and killing innocent cute creatures. Not satisfied with killing just animals, he lures Michiru into the forest at night and hunts her down in his astral form. Nana and Kyouya step in to thwart his hunt, but in the aftermath Michiru dies in the process of reviving severely injured Nana.
• The Mole: Nana herself, planted in the school as a fake Talented.
• Moral Disambiguation: Nana starts off as a Talentless sent by the government to infiltrate and kill various Talented individuals. While she's a ruthless murderer, she's portrayed sympathetically due to her Dark and Troubled Past and her genuine belief that the people she kills will become much greater threats to humanity at large if they're not "nipped at the bud". But as the story progresses, she begins to grow more and more disillusioned by her mission and eventually turns against her employer, Tsuruoka, who is the true villain of the story. Unlike Nana, Tsuruoka has no sympathetic motives for wanting to oppress and kill the Talented, and the people he subsequently employs in Nana's place are just as power-hungry and cruel as he is, and the conflict gradually becomes less about the ethics and morality of handling dangerous superhuman powers, and becomes a more standard villain vs. hero face-off.
• Morality Pet: Michiru and later Moe for Nana. The former being a truly kind Talented makes Nana question her mission, especially after Michiru commits a Heroic Sacrifice to heal Nana. Even after her death, Hiiragi still keeps her deceased friend in mind.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: The government. Sure, the people they've sent to die in concentration camps are super-powered assholes who nearly destroyed the world, but the truth is that the government doesn't care; they find the most destructive, sociopathic talented/non-talented to fill their higher ranks and orchestrate mass terrorist attacks on the non-talented to blame the general talented, using the fear to get themselves elected into absolute power. They outright dress in Imperial Japanese uniforms, as if to say, "we're back, bitches". Furthermore, it's shown that they don't particularly care if anyone who works for them, be they either Talented brainwashed into servitude or regular human beings, are killed in the way of their goal. As revealed by Fujiyama, a reporter working on the inside towards Nana and her friends, Kario has increased military spending, planning on using it against not only the Talented, but any and all threats against the country at the cost of the citizens' freedoms.
• Necromantic: Yuuka claims she brought Shinji back because she couldn't bear to lose her childhood love. She actually murdered him in order to have his corpse to herself when he rejected her and got together with someone else.
• Never Found the Body: Several of Nana's kills happen in ways where the reader never sees the body, and none of their remains are discovered by the rest of the cast after their disappearances are noticed. While Jin confirms most of their deaths, Nanao was rescued by Tsuruoka.
• New Super Power: Talented, particularly during adolescence, have been known to develop new abilities related to their existing talent.
• The Omniscient Council of Vagueness: The government organization which trained and hired Nana has little of its motivations on display, aside from wanting to exterminate the Talented.
• Pink Girl, Blue Boy: In addition to the red and blue school uniforms matching the respective genders, Nana has pink hair to Kyoka's blue.
• Red Herring: The series has a lot of fake clues and misdirections, most of which are detailed in the Characters tab.
• Remember the New Guy?: Happens all the time. Basically, every time there's a new arc or important moment, a new character gets introduced to the story, sometimes with a Lampshade Hanging that Nana or others never noticed them before. The most extreme example is Ryuuji, the guy who unlike most of students didn't have Friendless Background and was considered as a very kind soulmate for many classmates, yet his first appearance is already as a corpse.
  • The anime adaptation however averts this, by already showing many important for the plot classmates in the first episode alone, as seen on the page's image.
• Rewatch Bonus: The series is full of misdirection, omitted details, and outright untruths. Going back to earlier chapters, you can see all the foreshadowing and inconsistencies before the characters themselves point them out.
• Ship Sinking: As many sweet, affectionate, and romantically-ambiguous moments Nana and Michiru have, any chances of a relationship are sunk when the latter is Killed Off for Real.
• Shout-Out:
  • The first pages already reference a certain superpowered school battle manga, when Nanao reads it, only later for Moguo to wreck it with his fire talent, and later for Seiya to "repair" it with his freeze talent.
  • It can't be a coincidence that Nana's inner monologues are tinted red and Kyouyas' are tinted blue in the anime.
• Significant Name Overlap: Nanao Nakajima is deliberately given a similar name to Nana to mislead the audience to think that he's the eponymous "Talentless Nana", especially as he says his power only affects other superpowered beings.
• Smug Super: A lot of the Talented students know how powerful they are and like to show off or consider themselves above reproach. This is part of the reason the world deems them so dangerous.
• Superpower Lottery: Talents vary wildly in power and usefulness and the severity of their drawback. Seiya and Muguo have high offensive power with relatively minor restrictions in how they can apply it, while Muguo’s henchman has yet to provide any use for his minor magnetic pull powers. Yuuka and Hikaru are powerful when they can use their talents, but are effectively talentless for long stretches at a time. This is without taking into account big-time lottery winners like Jin, who can effectively use any other talent so long as its original wielder is still alive and is skilled at subverting the restrictions on when he can transform.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Who knew that Nanao would survive Nana's murder and become a very dangerous individual for the entire cast in the later part of the story?
• Uriah Gambit: When Tsuruoka reveals the truth behind Nana's recruitment as an assassin, he states that the organization's members placed bets on how far she would get before getting caught, showing that they never expected her to survive her mission. They only indoctrinated her into being an assassin out of spite for her parents, who opposed them.
• Villain Protagonist: After the initial twist of her almost killing Nanao, the series follows Nana in her attempts to assassinate everyone in her class without getting caught. She eventually has Heel Realization and becomes The Atoner for rest of the story.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Nana gets away with a number of murders that she’s implicated in with a combination of a good reputation that inclines people to believe her and the general vagueness of the Enemies of Humanity allowing her to draw on information the teachers give students to explain away the more incredulous elements of her lies. However she realizes that what she did was wrong and reveals the truth to other classmates, knowing she won't be Easily Forgiven.
• Wham Episode: Several.
  • Episode 1: Nanao is murdered and we discover Nana's true nature and mission on the island.
  • Chapter 28 and Episode 13: Nana suffers a mortal injury trying to save Michiru. Michiru, in turn, revives her at the cost of her own life.
  • Chapter 47: Tsuruoka confesses to the murder of Nana's parents and her being manipulated into becoming a child soldier and Nana almost commits suicide during her second Despair Event Horizon.
  • Chapter 48: Nanao is alive and has become Tsuruoka's replacement after Nana stops being useful to the Organization.
  • Chapter 68: Tsuruoka sets his plans into motion and manages to capture Jin and Kyoya. Nana tries to warn her classmates only to find Nanao present, who already revealed everything to them and then uses his powers to have everyone beat her almost to death. After a three year timeskip we see Nana in a rehabilitation center happily declaring the Talented to be her enemies.
• Wham Line: "That night, your window was locked." when Nana learns the truth about her parents' gruesome murder and Tsuruoka's being an irredeemable Manipulative Bastard.
• Wham Shot:
  • Episode 1 and its First-Episode Twist - Nana throws Nanao off the cliff, then she reveals her true nature as an assassin, complete with a devious look on her face.
  • Jin transforming into Nanao, revealing him to have survived his assassination attempt.
  • Moe's grandmother died, and she has become delusional in response.
  • Chapter 85 reveals that the Enemies of Humanity do exist — they're the adult forms of the Talented.
• Windmill Crusader: The Talented students are led to believe that they are training to fight "Enemies of Humanity" — monstrous life forms whose appearances and abilities are vaguely described. However, the Talented are never seen fighting these monsters, as the island is meant to isolate them from the rest of the world until the Talented are killed off one way or another. In a sadistic twist, these monsters do exist, only that they're the adult forms of the Talented, and the mutations can be anywhere between age 20 to 40. There is no cure yet, so the only way to prevent these mutations is to kill the Talented before they happen.
• Would Hit a Girl: Several of Nana's victims are her female classmates.
• Would Hurt a Child: The government, and especially Tsuruoka, are more than willing to kill children or simply make them commit suicide if they're either Talented, or have simply stopped being useful to them. In Chapter 68, it's revealed that brainwashing isn't off the table either, as they manage to make Nana hate Talented all over again, but are also willing to harm or kill her if she steps out of line.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Tsunekichi’s predictions are 100% accurate, and attempting to prevent one after seeing it will likely be the cause of it coming true.

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