The Toaru franchise has been running since 2004, and at this point, it’s genuinely massive. What started as Kazuma Kamachi’s light novel series A Certain Magical Index has expanded into multiple anime, spinoffs, manga, and games, all set inside Academy City, a futuristic scientific metropolis where students develop supernatural abilities called esper powers. Then magic gets thrown into the mix, and suddenly there’s an entire secret world running underneath the city that most people have no idea exists.
What keeps fans invested across all that content isn’t just the world-building. It’s the characters. The Toaru franchise has a habit of introducing someone as a villain and slowly making them the most compelling person in the room, or building side characters with enough depth that entire spinoff series get created just to spend more time with them. This list covers the fan favorites, the ones who show up in every popularity poll, every Reddit thread, and every conversation about why this franchise still has people hooked twenty years later.
1. Mikoto Misaka
Mikoto ranked first in the official Imaginary Fest character popularity poll, beating out the entire cast, including the main protagonist, and nobody was surprised. The third-ranked Level 5 esper in Academy City, Mikoto can fire a coin at three times the speed of sound, hack any electronic system nearby, and generate enough electricity to rival a power plant. On paper, she’s untouchable. However, the Sisters Arc then proceeds to completely dismantle that image, and everything interesting about her character starts right there.
Scientists used her DNA to manufacture 20,001 clones for a series of experiments she had no say in. What she does when she finds out, and how far she’s willing to go despite knowing it probably won’t be enough, is the reason she resonates so deeply with fans. Creator Kazuma Kamachi designed her to always face situations that outscale her, which forces real growth rather than easy victories.
2. Accelerator
The first time you meet Accelerator, he’s already the scariest person in the room. Ranked number one out of seven Level 5 espers in Academy City, his ability to control vectors makes him effectively invincible. Any force that touches him gets redirected instantly. Bullets bounce back. Explosions fold away. He joined the Sisters experiment specifically to make himself so terrifying that nobody would ever dare challenge him again, which is a deeply broken kind of logic that the show actually takes seriously rather than dismissing.
After his debut, Accelerator topped nearly every fan-favorite poll in the franchise. The short version is that one unexpected encounter with a child forces him to confront everything he’s built around himself, and the person he becomes on the other side of that is genuinely fascinating to follow. His own spinoff anime covers this period, and while the show itself gets mixed reviews, Accelerator as a character is consistently the best argument for why the Toaru franchise has lasted as long as it has.
3. Touma Kamijou
Officially a Level 0 esper, which in Academy City terms means he has basically no measurable power. What he actually has is Imagine Breaker, a mysterious ability housed in his right hand that cancels any supernatural phenomenon it touches, whether that’s magic, esper powers, or anything in between. It doesn’t make him invincible since he still takes hits like a regular person, but it makes him uniquely dangerous in a world built entirely around supernatural abilities.
Touma is a genuinely divisive character, and that’s part of what makes him interesting. Anime News Network noted it took them 14 volumes of the light novels to fully understand his appeal, and that experience is pretty common among new fans. He’s reckless, lectures his opponents constantly, and solves most problems with his fists despite having no combat training. But he’s also completely unattached to either the science or magic factions, which makes him the only person in the story who can move freely between both worlds.
4. Kuroko Shirai
Most people’s first impression of Kuroko is the comedy. She’s Mikoto’s roommate and self-declared devoted admirer at Tokiwadai Middle School, dramatically calling her “Onee-sama” and getting electrocuted for it on a regular basis. That dynamic is genuinely funny, and the show leans into it hard. But reducing her to the running gag misses everything underneath it. She’s a Level 4 teleporter and a dedicated Judgment officer who can transport herself and objects up to 81.5 meters instantly, and she uses that ability with real tactical intelligence when things get serious.
What actually makes Kuroko work as a character is that her loyalty to Mikoto isn’t played as a joke when it counts. She regularly puts herself in danger to protect someone who is objectively more powerful than her, without hesitation and without making it a big moment. Her Japanese voice actress, Satomi Arai, won Best Supporting Actress at the 5th Seiyu Awards in 2011 for the role, which is a pretty clear sign that the performance communicates more depth than the surface-level comedy suggests.
5. Misaki Shokuhou
The fifth-ranked Level 5 in Academy City, Shokuhou is known simply as “The Queen,” and the differences between her and Mikoto couldn’t be more apparent, both physically and mentally. Where Mikoto overwhelms with raw power, Misaki controls minds. Her ability, Mental Out, covers everything from memory manipulation and sensory distortion to full psychological possession, and she organises all of it into numbered categories accessed through a remote control she carries everywhere. In fact, Shokuhou often doesn’t even need direct physical confrontation to neutralize an opponent, making her one of the most dangerous Espers.
While Misaki walks through Tokiwadai projecting confidence, often surrounded by her large clique and constantly teasing Mikoto, there’s more going on beneath the surface. She has a complicated past tied to the protagonist Touma, and part of the emotional weight comes from the fact that he doesn’t remember their shared history because of his lost memories.
6. Ruiko Saten
Everyone in Saten’s immediate circle has powers. Mikoto controls electricity and ranks third among all Level 5 espers. Kuroko teleports. Even Uiharu has a passive ability. Saten moved to Academy City from outside the city specifically to develop esper powers of her own, and after all that effort she came out the other side as a Level 0, which in Academy City’s framework essentially means she failed. That gap between what she hoped for and what she got sits quietly underneath every scene she’s in, giving her an emotional grounding that a lot of the more powerful characters in the franchise simply don’t have.
What makes her work is that she refuses to be defined by that. She carries a metal bat, runs directly toward danger her friends can handle with abilities she doesn’t have, and somehow makes friends with nearly everyone she meets regardless of how dangerous they are. Fans have pointed out that some of the franchise’s most menacing characters warm up specifically around her, which says a lot about how Kazuma Kamachi wrote her. She’s the person in the story who reminds you what all the fighting is actually supposed to be protecting.
7. Last Order
Last Order is the 20,001st of Mikoto’s clones, the last one produced before the Sisters experiment was shut down, which is where the name comes from. Unlike her sisters, she can actually show emotions freely and process individual thoughts rather than operating through the shared network. Physically she looks like a ten-year-old version of Mikoto, which she is deeply unhappy about, and she communicates in third person by constantly referring to herself as “Misaka” mid-sentence, a quirk that somehow makes every line she delivers funnier than it has any right to be.
Her importance to the story goes well beyond comedy though. She is the character most directly responsible for shifting the trajectory of the franchise’s most powerful and dangerous figure, and that role carries real weight even when the show is playing her scenes completely straight.
8. Index Librorum Prohibitorum
The entire franchise is named after her, which makes it easy to forget that she spends a surprising amount of it getting sidelined. Index is a nun from the Church of England who has memorised 103,000 forbidden magical grimoires in her photographic memory, making her the most comprehensive repository of magical knowledge in the world. The cruel irony is that she has absolutely no ability to use any of it herself. She is essentially the most dangerous library that has ever existed, walking around in a white robe and biting Touma on the head whenever he annoys her, which is often.
Day to day though, she’s a lot more normal than that sounds. She’s often hungry, gets excited over simple things due to her isolated upbringing, and is basically trying to adjust to normal life. Behind that, the Church installed a layered control system called a “Collar” that blocks her from using the grimoires in her body and affects her health. They also misled her former partners about her condition out of fear she could betray the Church. Her yearly memory erasure is part of this system to keep those restraints stable.
9. MISAKA 10032
Out of 20,001 clones produced from Mikoto’s DNA, 10032 is the one the story keeps coming back to. As her name suggests, she was scheduled to be killed in the 10032nd experiment against Accelerator as part of the Level 6 Shift Project, which is where Touma finds her and where everything changes. She communicates in the same flat, third-person reporting style shared by all the Sisters, narrating her own observations like someone filing a status update, but the warmth underneath that suppressed emotional programming comes through anyway in ways the show lets speak for themselves rather than explaining.
Misaka 10032 develops a bond with Touma that Mikoto visibly notices and is extremely unhappy about, competes with other clones over a love letter, and gradually becomes a fully distinct presence rather than just a numbered unit from the experiment. A lot of that humanity comes through the black stray cat she adopts. She even goes to the library to research cat care, showing how seriously she starts taking responsibility for it. At first it can’t get close to her because of her electromagnetic field, so Touma usually ends up carrying it while she suggests ridiculous names like “Dog” and “Schrödinger.” The joke eventually comes full circle when the cat ends up being named “Later,” and by the end it’s comfortable enough to sit with her despite the field.
10. Kanzaki Kaori
Fewer than 20 Saints exist in the entire world. Kanzaki is one of them, and one of the youngest, which means her body carries physical characteristics close enough to the Son of God to grant her strength and speed that put her in a completely different category from almost every other fighter in the series. She wields a two-metre nodachi called Seven Heavens Seven Swords and fights using a technique called Nanasen, combining the blade with razor wires to cut across multiple targets simultaneously. Stiyl Magnus once noted that a single Saint carries roughly the destructive potential of a nuclear weapon. That being said, Kanzaki walks around Academy City like a concerned older sister.
That gap between how terrifying she actually is and how she carries herself is what fans find endlessly entertaining. Her sorcery name, Salvare000, translates as “be the salvation of those who cannot be saved,” which she takes completely seriously while also being the same person who abandoned her entire religious community because she resented being told her role in it was decided before she was born. She leads the Amakusa Christians, gets flustered around Touma in ways she absolutely refuses to acknowledge, and somehow remains one of the most quietly compelling characters in a series full of people who could level buildings.
