https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LIYVyD-Q0U
Misaka Makoto is famous for being the Railgun, an advanced military weapon in the form of an anime girl who loves frogs. No wonder she’s so popular in France. Remember, they’re just jokes, but did you know Misaka has many different applications1 of her Electromaster ability and a variety of forms? For those of you who are unfamiliar, Misaka is the main protagonist of A Certain Scientific Railgun and one of the main heroines of A Certain Magical Index, and is one of the most popular light novel characters of all time.
She is one of the seven Level Five Vespers in Academy City, and as such, she’s technically limited to just one power on paper, that being the power to manipulate electricity. That sounds pretty simple and not exactly the most original ability in anime.
But ultimately, it is the creative applications of this one power that give her a wide variety of abilities inspired by real-life physics.
Not only can she discharge bolts of electricity,
project
to send or throw sth up or away from yourself 投掷；抛射；发送
Actors must learn to project their voices. 演员必须学会放开声音。
figurative
The powerful men who would project him into the White House 能使他平步进入白宫的有力人士
but Misaka’s body is constantly projecting electromagnetic waves, which act as her own passive radar. When the waves hit an object around her,
Extra-sensory perception means knowing without using your ordinary senses such as sight and hearing. Some people believe this is possible. The abbreviation ESP is also used.
this is just one of many creative features of her esper power.
This also extends to an electromagnetic barrier2 which covers her entire body and can block out Shokuhou Saki’s mind-controlling mental out ability.
As Misaka can control her bioelectricity to stop it, Misaka can also control her bioelectricity to boost her physical attributes such as speed and strength.
This power is known as Rampage Dress and is the esper power of Hokaze Junko, the second in command of Shokuhou’s clique.
As Hokaze is also an Electromaster of sorts, she taught Misaka how to apply her ability to use Rampage Dress, although Misaka isn’t a huge fan of the ability. A slight mistake in boosting her physical attributes like this could result in injury. Since she’s the strongest Electromaster, she could apply too much power, which would end up damaging her nervous system. Also, since the ability involves controlling the flow of power within the body, it reminded Misaka of Accelerator, likely referencing his blood flow reversal—an application of his vector control ability which he used to kill a Misaka clone while Makoto was watching.
Therefore, Misaka is apprehensive to use it because of these two factors. However, she used it after being hit to jump forward and land on a wall, but she failed to control it in this instance, and as a result, she dislocated her thigh.
We also saw Misaka use it in the anime, as revealed by the editor of the Railgun manga, where Misaka dropped in front of the Moon while fighting Seika in Railgun T. There might be other instances, but these two are the only ones confirmed so far.
Let’s talk more in detail about Misaka’s electricity. Her maximum output is 1 billion volts, which is the same as natural lightning. Speaking of that, Misaka can also influence the clouds and summon real lightning directly from the sky. One of Misaka’s most common attacks is her Lightning Spear. Although despite the name of this attack, it is created via her own electricity rather than natural lightning. Misaka herself is also immune to electrical attacks, which should be obvious since she would probably electrocute herself whenever she tried to use her power. She can also use her electricity to break down other electrical powers, like she did in the Railgun manga, and she can also use it to manipulate the air around her, such as creating ozone from oxygen, and can also influence the composition and flow of air. She can also create plasma by ionizing metal; however, she hasn’t shown anything on the scale of what Accelerator created in the Railgun manga and anime, where he made a giant plasma ball the size of Academy City. It’s not really clear yet if Misaka can rival this level of power with plasma.
There is one application of his power you likely have no idea about unless you’ve read Railgun SS1, as this hasn’t appeared in the anime and likely never will. Let’s face it, I have more chance of winning the lottery than Railgun ever getting an adaptation. But in this story, Misaka is able to create water wings from water vapor that was released from the ocean from the attacks that occurred prior. She used the static electricity between the particles to gather and manipulate the water vapor into wings, and she used her electrical power to induce electrolysis, obtaining hydrogen and oxygen to use as fuel. With these wings, she was able to fly for a short period of time and destroyed missiles. Misaka’s electricity can also repel electron-based attacks such as Mugino Shizuri’s Meltdowner, which fires electron particles that cause a disintegrating effect upon contact with surfaces. She’s also highly adept at hacking various pieces of technology or disrupting electronic signals, causing an EMP effect.
Another core component of Misaka’s ability is her magnetism, being able to magnetize nearby metallic objects or surfaces around her. Although if the metal is rusted, she cannot magnetize it. Misaka likes to use her magnetism to manipulate iron sand, molding it into a chainsaw with each bit of sand vibrating so fast that it will cut nearly anything if it comes into contact with it. With enough iron sand at her disposal, she was even able to create an iron sand Kaiju as big as a skyscraper. It was even able to use a huge railgun from its hand. She was also able to create an iron sand tsunami which she used to take out an entire Russian military base in World War III. If you can’t remember the scene in the anime, don’t worry because it was never included.
Misaka also uses her magnetism to be able to stick to surfaces and actually swing from building to building due to the metal components present in most structures. So yes, Misaka is basically the love child of Electro and Spider-Man. Misaka can also create different kinds of electromagnetic waves, including microwaves. So, not only is she a real-life military naval weapon, but also a fully portable microwave. Seems legit.
If you’d like to see more Index and Railgun videos just like this, don’t forget to subscribe below so you don’t miss a future video. The signature move of Misaka Makoto that needed its own origin story about how she came up with it: Misaka uses Lorentz force and imagines a set of parallel rail lines—or at least that’s how she did it the first time. This is all in order to fire a small object from the form of her fingers at three times the speed of sound to cause devastating damage. Misaka normally uses arcade coin tokens for her Railgun, but she’s very capable of propelling much larger objects by punching them with the coin. She has a max range of about 50 meters, but the range and power depend on what other objects she can use. In the light novel, we also saw a different variation of the Railgun in New Testament 18, but I’ll discuss that later in the video, so stay tuned.
As we saw in Railgun Season 3 and in the manga, Misaka began her slow transformation into a Level Six thanks to Kihara Gensei linking her to the Misaka Network via exterior. It is worth noting that none of Misaka’s Level 6 Shift forms are a full Level Six, as she would have exploded into a supernova the moment she reached this milestone, as she is unable to control it safely. Therefore, her forms are referred to in the A Certain Scientific Railgun fandom as 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3. It is worth noting we probably would have seen more forms if she hadn’t been stopped by Thomas Dragonstrike. As she continued to evolve like a Pokémon, Misaka became slowly more inhuman. Her development grew horns, a third eye, and then her body appeared like a silhouette but with many stars visible within it, along with a halo above her head. According to the notes made about her last form’s character design, she was slowly becoming more like an angel, with her appearance basically a scientific angel.
In her first form, Misaka showed to have her standard abilities of manipulating electricity and magnetism brought to a much greater extent by releasing huge electric blasts, magnetizing the rubble of multiple skyscrapers and other structures, and creating a large iron sand barrier which stops any incoming attacks. In her 5.2 form, a mass of light in the shape of a grid appeared as part of Misaka but floating beside her, and she was able to propel this to hit Sogita while he was off guard. Now, in the last form we saw, Misaka used black and purple lightning to create a wall protecting her while she was creating a huge mass of energy in the shape of a black ball that, if released, would likely destroy Academy City and much more.
Now, let’s talk about the story from the Index light novel