My Hero Academia has one of the best female casts in anime today. However, it's exactly because of its strong number of girls with actual agency and personality that makes it so hard to narrow down people's fan favorites, let alone give every heroine the attention that she deserves. One unlucky lady is Pinky herself, Mina Ashido.
For a character that just inherently stands out, she doesn't really exist in the fan conversations as much as Ochaco, Momo, or Tsuyu. With the recent showings for Eri, Mirko, and even Mount Lady, the competition only becomes steeper. As such, this list will be giving Mina a special shout out, as it breaks down some of the strangest things that - for better or worse - help her stand out.
10 Using Her Quirk
With her Quirk, "Acid," Mina is able to excrete strong quantities of corrosive acid, the solubility and viscosity of which she can apparently control at will. However, the act of doing so is a little puzzling. Seeing her use it, it seems that Mina is able to control her Quirk similarly to Bakugo, in that they both excrete their volatile liquids out of their pores.
However, while Bakugo has to work up a sweat to use his Quirk. Mina on the other hand is able to sweat or just push the acid from her skin which is not as easy to imagine.
9 Sliding Technique
One of the oddest things about Acid is when Mina adjusts its qualities so that she's able to excrete it from her feet and slide around. This offers plenty of opportunities for mobility and easily makes her one of the fastest students in Class 1-A.
However, while the ability to instantly have a Slip-and-Slide is pretty convenient, this slipperiness is a little misused. Acids are not inherently slipper. Its chemical colleague, bases, are. Acids are just wet. While the series may play around with some of its concepts, this little bit may mislead some people to thinking that acid can be slippery and make others wonder how exactly her Quirk works.
8 Acid Veil
Adding on to the confusing things that Mina does with acid, she also has a defensive technique called "Acid Veil." With it, Mina is able to summon gelatinous veils from either of her palms, allowing her to defend from strong projectiles. Obviously, being able to summon strong, flexible shields like this is pretty useful, especially during a fire fight.
However, solubility and viscosity aside, how was Mina exactly able to push a gelatinous liquid out of her skin? Did her pores expand to allow her to just gush out a literally thicker form of her acid? Is she able to just change the properties of acid at a whim and not just within her body? Have people hopefully not taken science notes from this anime?
7 Burning Herself
Like any good power system, the Quirks of My Hero Academia have limitations, many of which are tied to the physical limitations of their users. In Mina's case, if Acid is used too much, it may actually begin to burn her. It makes sense to put some limitation on powers, but this one is a little strange in concept. At what point does Mina's own Acid begin to burn her?
Has she always been burning herself whenever she uses her Quirk? Does her skin just get so worn and tired that it can suddenly just lose the properties to protect her from her own excretions? Mina actually begins to build some tolerance to it during her training, a concept that begs even more questions such as: "Can people just become more resistant to corrosive acid? or "How does one train to not melt?"
6 Acidman
Last but not least, this list will touch on Mina Ashido's own super move, Acidman. Using it, Mina is able to surround herself in a large, near creature-like form that can protect her from all projectiles, essentially acting as a more advanced version of her Acid Veil.
What makes Acidman even stranger than Acid Veil though is the fact that it takes an oddly anthropomorphic form. Mina never portrays this move as having a mind of its own, but one has to wonder why she would go to all the trouble of giving a critical, last ditch maneuver specific properties like ears and eyes.
5 Her Jacket
Matching her own, naturally eye-drawing appearance, Mina has one of the most distinctive costumes in all of Class 1-A. For hero duties, she dons a skin tight suit, appropriately colorized with a purple acid wash as well as her specialized boots which carry holes that let her use her sliding ability.
Like a lot of My Hero Academia's costumes, there's plenty of attention here for both style and substance. However, there are a couple of additions in Mina's costume that are either redundant or useless. One such item would be her brown jacket. Aside from just protecting her upper body from the cold, there's no clear purpose to this addition than fashion. It even includes some fuzz around the neckline, something that must be constantly getting soaked or worn given Mina's Quirk.
4 Her Mask
While Mina's jacket at least covers her from the abrasiveness of slight winds, one has to wonder what exactly her mask does. Masks for superheroes do one of two things: 1) Protect the person's identity and 2) Protect the person's face. Mina's mask does neither. It certainly doesn't hide the identity of someone with purple skin, black eyes, and horns. It also doesn't add much protection that her own Acid Veil or Acidman can't provide. In so many words, it's just a hat on a hat for an already distinctive character.
3 Screen Time
This is something that Horikoshi Kohei has reluctantly admitted to, but it can never be overstated. Mina Ashido, in both design and personality, is one of the most vibrant characters in the entire series. If this were any other anime, whether it would be another shonen series or even a Slice-of-Life anime, a bubbly and supportive character like Mina would naturally be one of the leading characters if not a recurring one that can helps drive some stories.
On top of that, she's also one of the strongest female students in Class 1-A, a group that rarely features its girls in substantial action sequences. It's for reasons like this that it's confusing and even infuriating that Mina and some of her colleagues can go through long arcs without screen time, whereas other characters have a stronger focus put on them.
2 Intelligence
Mina Ashido is certainly not a stupid character. She's one of the most active and capable students of Class 1-A and uses one of the most complex Quirks that, despite some logistic issues addressed above, require some knowledge, talent, and sense of balance to control. Mina was even able to teach some of the most inept members of her class how to dance in time for the concert, a feat that only a well-articulated person in their craft can do.
It's qualities like this that just make it hard to understand that she would be within the bottom 10% of Class 1-A. While people can have smarts in different areas, it's hard to believe that Mina's sense of concentration and control doesn't contribute to some academic sense.
1 Original Hero Name
Last but not least, this list touches on a piece of meta knowledge that really makes one question in what world MHA exists. When Class 1-A was playing around with their hero names, Mina initially picked out "Alien Queen" as her first. Alien Queen of course refers to the Queen from Ridley Scott's Alien, a similarly distinctive character with a propensity for acid attacks.
While it's nice to see Mina pay homage to her conceptual inspiration, it's a little weird thinking of whether or not the Alien series exists in MHA and how a piece of media like that could be handled in a world where strange looking organisms have become the norm.