Quick TakeArticle at a glance
- Yukinobu Tatsu's Dandadan , officially announced as a Science SARU anime adaptation back in 2023, has become one of the biggest shonen properties of the decade, and its power scaling is unusually hard to pin down on purpose.
- Characters who haven't fought on-panel yet, like several Serpo and background curses, are left off rather than guessed at.
- Reiko Kashima's Mirror Prison ability, born from a real Japanese urban legend, lets her sync her personal mirror to any reflective surface and pull enemies into a separate dimension with no confirmed size limit.
The strongest Dandadan characters are ranked here by canon feats shown through the Season 2 anime and Chapter 71 of the manga, not fan speculation — topped by the Slit-Mouthed Woman, the Evil Eye, and Turbo Granny, with Momo Ayase and Okarun closing the gap fast as the story’s psychic and yokai power scales keep colliding.
Last updated: September 15, 2026
Yukinobu Tatsu’s Dandadan, officially announced as a Science SARU anime adaptation back in 2023, has become one of the biggest shonen properties of the decade, and its power scaling is unusually hard to pin down on purpose. This ranking covers every major yokai, alien, and human combatant revealed through Season 2 (which adapts Chapters 34–71, ending on the Kaiju Arc) and the ongoing manga, using feats shown on-page rather than raw hype. For more on the show’s breakout run, see our earlier coverage of why DAN DA DAN Season 2 dominated summer 2025.
How We Ranked These Characters
Dandadan deliberately avoids a numbered power system like Hunter x Hunter’s Nen or Jujutsu Kaisen’s cursed energy, so this list weighs three things: confirmed feats (who has actually won or matched an opponent on-page), the scale of the ability itself, and how the story itself frames a character’s threat level. Characters who haven’t fought on-panel yet, like several Serpo and background curses, are left off rather than guessed at.
The Strongest Dandadan Characters, Ranked
1. Reiko Kashima (The Slit-Mouthed Woman)
Reiko Kashima’s Mirror Prison ability, born from a real Japanese urban legend, lets her sync her personal mirror to any reflective surface and pull enemies into a separate dimension with no confirmed size limit. Her durability is the real headline: she has tanked a full-strength punch from Vamola in her giant kaiju suit without being knocked back, which is the single biggest physical feat shown in the series so far.
2. Evil Eye
The Evil Eye is a yokai whose stated goal is human extinction, and in his original form he could command victims to take their own lives with a glance. After possessing Jiji’s body, he gained the ability to compress the accumulated grudges (curses) of the dead into a soccer-ball-sized orb of raw destructive force, a power large enough that both Okarun and Granny Ayase needed everything they had to put him down.
3. Turbo Granny
The yokai who started the entire plot by stealing Okarun’s “family jewels,” Turbo Granny is built around supernatural speed reportedly clocked around 100 km/h in her original form, paired with monstrous close-range strength. Sealed into a maneki-neko doll for most of Season 2, she pivots to a second, subtler power: manipulating luck itself, which is arguably scarier than raw speed once you understand how far it reaches.
4. Vamola
Vamola is a Sumerian alien who came to Earth looking for a mate strong enough to carry on her bloodline, and her kaiju-sized battlesuit backs that up with size-enhancement and brute force strong enough to level a house. She lost her introductory fight to Reiko Kashima, but the gap between the two was closer than the final result suggests.
5. Okarun (Ken Takakura)
Okarun’s real name is Ken Takakura, and his powers come from a supernatural encounter with Turbo Granny early in the story. His “All Out” mode lets him briefly tap into her top speed and strength, and he used it to go toe-to-toe with, and ultimately knock out, the Evil Eye himself — the clearest sign yet that he’s closing the gap on the series’ strongest yokai.
6. Momo Ayase
Momo is one of the few purely human characters on this list, carrying inherited telekinesis from the psychic Ayase family bloodline. Her power output is genuinely inconsistent by design (sometimes she can barely lift a chair, other times she throws grown men), but her real edge is tactical: she improvises faster in combat than almost anyone else in the cast.
7. Seiko Ayase (Granny Ayase)
Momo’s grandmother looks like classic comic relief until she’s dropped into a fight, where she shows superhuman speed and strength capable of standing toe-to-toe with the Evil Eye himself. She’s an outlier in the cast: an ordinary-looking older woman whose combat feats rival characters half her age, and the story never fully explains where her strength comes from.
8. Kinta Sakata
Kinta’s power isn’t a curse or yokai gift at all — he controls a shape-shifting nanoskin material that he can forge into towering mechanical exosuits, weapons, and vehicles on the fly. It’s the closest thing Dandadan has to a Iron-Man-style power set, and it scales with his imagination and materials on hand rather than any fixed cap.
9. Aira Shiratori (Acrobatic Silky)
After a supernatural encounter with the yokai Acrobatic Silky, Aira inherited her hair-based abilities: extending and hardening her hair into weapons while gaining extreme agility, balance, and acrobatic speed in her transformed state. It’s a support-and-mobility kit more than a brute-force one, which has made her a wildcard in group fights rather than a solo heavy-hitter.
10. The Serpo
The Serpo are the small grey aliens behind Okarun’s father’s abduction, and their power set leans psychic and technological rather than physical: telepathic communication, advanced craft, and crowd-control abilities the manga still hasn’t fully explained. They’re ranked lower here specifically because so little of their real combat capability has been shown on-page yet.
11. Jiji
Jiji has no supernatural power of his own for most of the story — he’s Momo and Okarun’s childhood friend, a normal teenager who gets dragged into fights he can’t win outright, including a stretch possessed by the Evil Eye against his will. He earns a spot on this list anyway because Dandadan keeps proving that raw power isn’t the same as narrative importance, and Jiji is the clearest example of that on the show.
Top 5 Power Comparison
The five characters at the top of this list win fights through completely different mechanics, which is exactly why ranking them by a single “power level” misses the point. This table breaks down power type, signature ability, and known weakness side by side.
| Character | Power Type | Signature Ability | Known Weakness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reiko Kashima | Yokai (mirror curse) | Mirror Prison dimension trap | Cannot attack outside reflective range |
| Evil Eye | Yokai (grudge curse) | Compressed-grudge destructive orb | Vulnerable once separated from a host body |
| Turbo Granny | Yokai (speed/luck curse) | ~100 km/h close-range speed | Physically sealed inside a doll |
| Vamola | Alien (tech-augmented) | Kaiju-scale battlesuit strength | Suit-dependent; loses power if disabled |
| Okarun (Ken Takakura) | Human + borrowed yokai power | “All Out” speed/strength mode | Mode is temporary and physically taxing |
Why Dandadan Keeps Its Power Scale Deliberately Vague
Dandadan’s refusal to hand out a numbered power system isn’t an oversight — it’s a genre subversion aimed squarely at shonen conventions like Jujutsu Kaisen’s cursed-energy math or Hunter x Hunter’s Nen categories, and it’s the reason “strongest character” lists for this series are inherently snapshots rather than settled rankings.
Compare Dandadan to a series like Jujutsu Kaisen, where cursed energy output is treated almost like a stat block characters can compare directly. Dandadan refuses that framework on purpose: Reiko Kashima’s durability and Turbo Granny’s speed aren’t measured on the same scale, and the story never lets you convert one into the other. The result is a cast where tactics, timing, and who a character is fighting for consistently outweigh raw numbers — which is also why Momo, one of the least physically powerful characters here, keeps winning fights that a stat-based shonen would have written her out of instantly.
Momo is like Superman. Superman helps people with his superhuman powers, but I don't think that's the core of who he is. In the face of violence or injustice, ordinary people often look away. But Superman's presence inspires people, giving them the courage to stand up against such evil. In the same way, Momo's actions and words inspire those around her.
Yukinobu Tatsu, Dandadan creator, in an interview with Shueisha's MANGA Plus
That quote, confirmed in a widely-cited MANGA Plus interview, is the clearest statement of intent from the creator himself: Momo’s value to the story was never meant to be measured in telekinetic output. It’s the same design logic that lets Jiji, a character with zero supernatural power, hold a spot on this list at all — Dandadan treats narrative weight and combat power as two separate axes, and that’s a deliberate departure from how most modern shonen, including Chainsaw Man, tend to collapse the two into one number.
Dandadan’s Momentum Backs Up the Hype
The ranking above isn’t happening in a vacuum — Dandadan’s manga and anime have both posted real, dated growth numbers through 2026 that explain why “strongest character” searches for this specific series have spiked. Manga sales and awards nominations are both up sharply year over year.
Shueisha confirmed Dandadan’s manga had sold 10 million copies by March 2025; by June 1, 2026, that figure had climbed to 14 million copies across 24 volumes — a roughly 40% jump in about 15 months (Shueisha, June 2026). On the anime side, Dandadan Season 2 led every series at the 10th Crunchyroll Anime Awards with 20 total nominations, the most of any show for the second year running (Anime News Network, April 2026), before going on to win Best Comedy Anime at the ceremony.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is the strongest character in Dandadan so far?
Based on feats confirmed through Season 2 and Chapter 71 of the manga, Reiko Kashima (the Slit-Mouthed Woman) has the strongest confirmed showing, largely because of her Mirror Prison ability and the fact she tanked a full-power hit from Vamola’s kaiju suit without being knocked back.
Is Momo or Okarun stronger in Dandadan?
As of Season 2, Okarun has the higher combat ceiling once his ‘All Out’ mode is active, since it let him defeat the Evil Eye directly. Momo’s telekinesis is less consistent in raw output, but her tactical improvisation has repeatedly closed fights Okarun’s strength alone couldn’t.
Will Dandadan reveal more powerful characters in Season 3?
Almost certainly. Season 2 ended on the Kaiju Arc around Chapter 71, and the ongoing manga has continued introducing new yokai, aliens, and curses well past that point, so any strongest-characters ranking will need revisiting once Season 3 adapts further chapters.
How do Dandadan’s ‘curse’ powers actually work?
Dandadan doesn’t use a single unified magic system. Yokai-based curses (like Turbo Granny’s or the Evil Eye’s) stem from Japanese folklore entities and tend to be tied to a specific legend’s traits, while human characters like the Ayase family draw on inherited psychic ability instead. The manga intentionally never converts these into a shared numeric scale.
