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

Deku's new quirk, Gearshift, allows him to change the speed at which something moves, whether it's himself or anything he comes into contact with. Luffy's Gear Second, on the other hand, makes his body move faster, making him capable of launching rapid attacks. Ultimately, these powers may seem similar at first glance, but they actually work in different ways.

Although the author of My Hero Academia seems to have drawn a lot of inspiration from One Piece, he still put a bit of his own style and imagination into it. So much so that it's worth delving deeper and going into the details of each of these abilities, to see how unique each one is.

Izuku Midoriya's Gear Change

As introduced in Chapter 368, Gearshift originally belonged to the unnamed second user of One For All, who used it solely to increase the speed and trajectory of the bullets he fired. After merging with One For All and resting for many years, the quirk activated, allowing Deku to use it freely. But how does he actually benefit from his new quirk?

As already explained, Gearshift is capable of altering the speed of anything at this point, which Deku carefully uses to increase his own movement and the speed of his punches and ultimate attacks. He first reveals this power, which highlights the similarity between it and Luffy's ability, his ultimate move called Transmission.

After using this quirk to quickly dash towards Shigaraki, Deku punches him multiple times, each punch increasing the effects of Gearshift on Shigaraki. Each of these speed increments is referred to by him as gears, ranging from Low Gear to Top Gear.

However, this isn't the only way he uses this power as he also combines it with one of his other quirks, Fa Jin. For those unfamiliar with it, Fa Jin allows the user to store kinetic energy and then boost their attack by releasing that energy.

This is such a significant increase in strength that it allows Deku to achieve an attack power similar to 100% of One For All while only using 45% of it. With Fa Jin, Gearshift allows Deku to not only hit his opponents faster than ever before, but also harder. This power is even described as being 120% of One For All's power and can be applied to any of Deku's ultimate moves, which he does with great style.

One of All Might and Deku's most famous attacks, Detroit Smash, takes on a new level while being affected by Gearshift and Fa Jin and transforms into another already iconic move, Detroit Smash: Quintuple. With this move, Deku quickly hit Shigaraki with five successive Detroit Smashes, a power so powerful it can even warp reality itself.

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

Luffy's Gears

In One Piece, from the beginning, Luffy was able to expand any part of his body thanks to his rubber construction, after eating the supposed Devil Fruit Gomu Gomu no Mi, which he used to create attacks to fight his enemies. But after facing great danger, Luffy realizes he must find new ways to use his power in order to become stronger. This brings us to his abilities called Gears.

Luffy has created many Gears throughout the series, each one bringing great excitement to fans. What they do is somehow enhance Luffy's abilities and take full advantage of his malleable body, such as enlarging his arms by inflating his bones or transforming himself into an inflatable man by inflating his muscles. However, the one that resembles Deku's Gearshift is Luffy's Gear Second.

With Gear Second, thanks to his entire body being made of rubber, Luffy boosts his blood circulation, allowing oxygen and nutrients to circulate much faster throughout his body. This leads to a significant increase in power and speed, transforming Luffy into a stronger version of himself.

The speed boost and its name make Gear Second sound very similar to Gearshift, when in reality they work very differently, but achieve a nearly identical result. Luffy reaches his potential by using his veins and rubber organs to accelerate his blood, thus speeding himself up, while Deku can accelerate (and decelerate) anything he comes into contact with, not just himself.

But they even have the same drawbacks, as it seems that Deku faints or else after using this quirk for more than 5 minutes and Luffy also got tired at first after using Gear Second, besides supposedly shortening his lifespan.

In addition to this, Luffy's powers have led him to greater strengths such as Gear Third, with which he made any limb extremely large by blowing a huge amount of air into its bones, and Gear Fourth, at that time, by blowing air into his muscles in different forms such as Bound Man, Tank Man and Snake Man. More recently, he also introduced Gear Fifth, which he transforms into his most free-spirited form and has no limits on how he approaches his enemies, only his imagination.

Ultimately, Deku's new quirk seems to have taken inspiration from Shounen Jump's most popular series, but added his own twist. With these two formidable and unusually strong main characters, the anime and manga industry has a lot to look forward to when these series conclude.