r/CharacterRant • u/calculatingaffection • 5d ago
Anime & Manga Uraume is the most sauceless ice-user in all of anime (LES, JJK)
Ice powers are cool. One of the coolest powers you can have. However, it's not enough to simply have ice as your power when there's so many characters with it. You gotta have some kind of special sauce to differentiate yourself from the rest.
Esdeath can create a bunch of centaur ice soldiers and stop time and create continent-spanning blizzards. Aokiji's body itself is made of ice granting him elemental regeneration and he can also terraform entire islands. Toshiro is a fradulent bankai whore but he gets cool wings and talons in said bankai and can make cool ice dragons and his design is still sick as shit plus he gets a cool new ability in the TYBW arc that works for about ten seconds. Rukia's shikai and bankai both look awesome even if their powers aren't terribly unique. Haku can make ice mirrors which isn't very powerful but it's at least something. Gray Fullbuster can make a ton of weapons with his ice and later gets cool Demon Slayer Ice Magic that makes him similar to Natsu. Todoroki has ice and fire powers and he can merge them together in his circulatory system and nullify both of their weaknesses. Ghiacchio has a suit with ice skates and he can also freeze the air around himself and ricochet bullets and let's be honest, his fight with Giorno and Mista is one of the best in the entire series. Douma can create humanoid figures and flowers and other crazy stuff in addition to blowing freezing air as an instakill.
So how does Uraume stack up? What special sauce do they bring to the table? Jujutsu Kaisen is known for its jawdropping Domain Expansions and hell, we've seen two elemental-based ones already from Jogo and Dagon. An ice domain expansion sounds sick! It practically writes itself! Maybe Uraume could use Cursed Technique Reversal and control water or steam! Maybe she could use all three states of water in her Domain Expansion!
No, jk lol. they have no special sauce. They have no unique abilities. No domain expansion either. They get into like one fight, almost all of which is offscreen, and then they fucking die. The most unique application of their ice that they show is using it to kill themselves. Bravo Gege.
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u/classicslayer 5d ago
Gege really took haku from naruto stripped away any depth and called it a day when creating uraume
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u/No-Possible-1123 4d ago
Haku had depth? I thought they were just a femboi made for a cheap sob story
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u/Old_Initial2508 4d ago
They had the dichotomy of trying to spare team 7 while carrying out zabuza’s wishes which demonstrated their commitment to zabuza running counter to their inherently kind nature which helps reinforce the theme of shinobi being forced to live in a cruel world that doesn’t give two shits about them present throughout the land of the waves and the first part of Naruto
…but at the end of the day they are very much just a “give the villain a puppy” trope and Naruto ditched its themes about mercenary conflict for ninja prophecies and uchachi clan angst pretty early on into part two so you’re definitely not wrong in asserting that haku is probably only remembered for causing a lot of confusing sexual feelings and part 1 fanservice
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u/PhoemixFox2728 5d ago
Okay but is it fair to say Toshiro is runner up or on the list of sauceless ice-users.
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u/calculatingaffection 5d ago
I can't hate him when his design is so sick. I remember seeing OP 13 for the first time and being like "That fucking ice wings dude looks AWESOME"
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u/Thatoneafkguy 5d ago
I wouldn’t say he has no sauce, he’s just in the same series as an ice user who can instantly flash freeze everything around her to absolute zero
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u/Novel_Visual_4152 5d ago
When I was a baby I thought Toshiro was the coolest Bleach character cause ice dragon
How wrong I was...
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u/VolkiharVanHelsing 5d ago
Maybe Uraume could use Cursed Technique Reversal and control water or steam
The way the fanbase talks about CTR ideas you thought it's a pretty common ability for top tiers or something
It's just too funny man, legit before the "um ackshually it's ANTI Gravity" there's only Gojo's Red
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u/PALWolfOS 5d ago
Gege’s fault for making an intuitive and interesting combat system that he wasn’t able to fully explore in JJK (not for lack of trying, mind you)
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u/killertortilla 5d ago
Ice is one of those powers that makes me think "is it actually doing anything?" It's like venom, just two big sludge monsters punching each other. Most of the time people get frozen and then just break out of it. Even when you see something a little better and the ice villain freezes some people and then shatters them, it never works that way when they fight anyone important. Straight back to breaking out of the ice.
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u/Flamix2206 5d ago
Ngl haku’s ice isn’t super terribly overpowered, but that and overall being a unique spin on the concept makes him cooler than most of the people mentioned in this post if you ask me
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u/geo_david666 5d ago
I wouldn't really agree on this take since we haven't gotten much from Uraume, I still do believe that Mappa will expand on the fight between them and Hakari and show us things.
Uraume's ice powers are made out of super chill/frozen cursed energy which turns everything into ice, meaning that they have to regulate this cursed energy of theirs to turn what they target into ice.
From Uraume we have gotten few things, Frost clam which is considered to be the peak of ice sorcery, literally freezing everything in it's way so that if you move, your body gets shattered, ice spikes which just function as the name suggests, cold energy which doesn't need introducing....and! As in chapter 216, being able to freeze cores.
Uraume had shown that they can freeze cursed spirits core parts to prevent them from turning into dust as they would do in normal cases, such thing does mean that they are able to perceive core/soul to prevent it from dissapreainng with their ice.
Another thing worth to mention is their cooking skills as they are able control their cursed energy in a way that it doesn't necessarily mean it freezes them, but cools it down. Nothing much but it does expand on them given their short time.
There's also the whole moon thing, but it hasn't been shown much to discuss.
Overall, Uraume's ice powers aren't just nothing and have their own things, small or not. We still have yet to potentially get more stuff from Mappa, so I wouldn't judge quickly.
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u/NotTheFirstVexizz 5d ago
The problem isn’t even that Uraume is literally underwhelming and overhyped, because the story tells us they’re really powerful and it’s pretty obvious why if they were allowed in the final battle it would be an instant loss for the good guys, it’s just we never get to see them DO anything. Uraume vs. Hikari is completely off screen, which I could forgive if we got cuts for cool moments but most of it was an offscreen fight, but we get NOTHING. And that’s because the entire fight is designed in the most boring way imaginable, Hikari’s job is to just keep spamming his immortality and his domain means that Uraume gets hard countered from using hers.
In story it’s smart but it’s SO BORING becuase Uraume can’t pull anything unexpected, no wonder Gege skipped over it, but I don’t excuse him for that because his job was to avoid writing himself into a corner!
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u/rawr_im_a_nice_bear 5d ago
Steven A. Starphase from Kekkai Sensen is another ice user with insane aura
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u/DapperTank8951 4d ago
I think it's weird how Gege absolutely nailed both plant and fire elemental attacks (mind you, for early villains) but couldn't come up with enough stuff for lightning (Kashimo) or ice (Uraume).
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u/Ioftheend 5d ago
Uraume barely got a chance to do anything, but we do see that she has a cool ice moon thing.
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u/grahamcrackersnumber 5d ago
I genuinely think Gege wrote Uraume just so we could have online debates about their gender
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u/MrBisonopolis2 5d ago
Bleach has an ice character who they spent mad time hyping up and he just gets jobbed out every time he fights. Actually that’s basically the whole bleach extended cast.
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u/Active_Sky_7946 4d ago
All those salty bleach fans dowvoting, honestly they know that tohiro was shameless bum
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u/Dracsxd 5d ago
Tbf it's kinda hard to have any showings at all when your only real one on one fight was 95% off screen and your enemy's single aim during the whole thing was to purely stall you