Inuyasha: A Hairy Fairy Tale (Anime Alphabet - I)

It was the first anime to appeal to me personally, and I still respect it in spite of the hairiness.

(This post was written as a script for the edited video above, which provides a more complete experience of the post’s subject. This video also contains unscripted interview sections notated in the text below. This text version is just for easier reference and comprehension for anyone in need.)

Very few artists have ever maintained the level of consistent global impact spanning decades of their career that Takahashi Rumiko-sensei has achieved with her most popular collection of manga series. Erupting into Weekly Shounen Sunday with Urusei Yatsura in 1979, whose main character Lum became one of the most cribbed-from designs of the 80s, Takahashi-sensei set the standards for the tone, pacing and breadth of possibility within the contemporary romantic comedy genre. Her more mellowed-out and mature romcom, Maison Ikkoku, was also popular in the 80s; but when both of those concluded, her next work, Ranma ½, would take the world by storm, even achieving about as much popularity in the English-speaking world as was possible for TV anime in the late 80s and early 90s. So much of romcom anime is rooted in Ranma that its influences are obvious to observers--but Takahashi-sensei’s next major work would take a very different direction from her previous major publications--and its anime adaptation would crack the West in major form like none of her prior work had had the opportunity to do. My name is Trixie the Golden Witch, and in this retrospective series on anime classics, I seek to understand why the most-beloved anime were capable of achieving such influence and acclaim. You can find more of my writing on goldenwitch.substack.com, and this is Anime Alphabet.

Anime Alphabet - I is for Inuyasha

Inuyasha is a vibe. Blending the shounen action formula with horror drawn from Japanese mythology, fans of Takahashi-sensei knew it hadn’t come out of nowhere completely, because of all the one-shot and short-form mythology-based horror manga which she’d published across previous decades. Ranma ½ was also kind of a shounen action series, even if it used those tropes so sparingly as to feel more like it was parodying them than trying to be sincerely serious as an action series. Artwork and general tone of character presentation aside, though, InuYasha is extremely unique not only from Takahashi-sensei’s prior work, but also from practically anything else which existed before it. 

If Inuyasha seemed to anyone like an attempt to ape anything, it would’ve been Watase Yuu-sensei’s Fushigi Yuugi, or Magical Play as it’s known in English, which ran from 1991-96, when Inuyasha started publication. That may seem like an odd comparison though, considering Fushigi Yuugi is a shoujo manga about a girl getting sent to another world based in Chinese mythology, whereas Inuyasha is a shounen manga about a girl getting sent back 500 years into a version of Japan where Takahashi-sensei’s takes on mythological monsters run wild. They go in very different directions, so I don’t think Inuyasha is a ripoff or anything like that, and Isekai stories were already becoming fairly commonplace by the mid-90s, with Escaflowne sending a girl into an epic mecha fantasy just a couple years earlier as well. I’m just trying to establish a context through which Inuyasha might have seemed like a logical next step in anime and manga history to some, as opposed to the completely alien shock that it was to me back in 2002.

As I remember it, my family had moved into a new house and didn’t have cable for a while, so when we got it back and I continued my loyal weekly viewing of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim anime block, there was suddenly a new show in one of its earlier timeslots with a completely different visual aesthetic from Cowboy Bebop, Yu Yu Hakusho, several Gundams, Outlaw Star, and Tenchi Muyo, which were running in the blocks around it. Vibrant green, mysterious and tinged with horror, the first episodes I saw were the third and fourth, which focus on a fight against a demon who manipulates hair for combat.

As I would learn through becoming a huge fan of Inuyasha over the coming year, Takahashi-sensei is a creator with an incredible amount of imagination. Consider that all of the major series she published were in weekly magazines, and that she sometimes ran multiple at once, or published side-stories just for the hell of it. Every single week Takahashi-sensei had to think of something interesting to draw her characters interacting with, and a decent excuse for why those things exist. The thought of creating fifty-two twenty-page stories every year for seven years using the same characters (as she has done like seven times) is beyond my scope of comprehension, even with a team of assistants helping to realize the time constraints.

None of Takahashi-sensei’s work is particularly consistent, and I don’t think that is as much of an insult as it might be if directed at another series. For instance, I watched all 160 episodes of the Ranma ½ anime adaptation. It had a lot of terrible filler episodes and arcs, and it also had a lot of terrible episodes and arcs based directly in the manga canon--which made it very difficult to watch at times. However, the first twenty or so episodes were so great, and established so much about the characters and settled us into their world so effectively that it’s not that I wouldn’t want to see 160 more stories featuring those characters--it’s just that only about 80 of the stories I actually got did I think were really worth watching. 

80 episodes is a LOT of good episodes of anime, even if not all of those are necessarily incredible. FLCL fans know that sometimes a single episode can be so perfect that it weighs more than a season of pretty-good episodes--but I do think that all of Takahashi’s stories have a significant amount of worthwhile content inside of them that you just have to work your way through some crap to get to at times. I will eventually get into the thick of my criticisms of Inuyasha which contribute heavily to my overall opinion of the series; but before I do that I want to talk about all the great stuff that works about the show which made me such a big fan of it back when I was 11-12.

My first strong visual memory of Inuyasha comes from the hair demon Yura chilling in her bed of skulls thinking about how much she wants to get her hands on Inuyasha’s gorgeous silver hair. I remember thinking that Yura’s hairstyle was actually really cool itself, and just loving her design overall, and the high-gothic aesthetic as applied to this rustic, mysterious setting. By this point I had seen Juupei Ninpuuchou, or Ninja Scroll, which I will be covering in the next episode of anime alphabet, which first introduced me to violent action animation and the tone of horror applied to a feudal Japanese setting. I wouldn’t yet have taken note that soundtrack composer Wada Kaoru-san was responsible for the moody, classically-influenced music bringing both of those stories to life. I had also seen the X/1999 film, which had turned me onto this brand of over-the-top gothic imagery in anime, which more strongly resembles the brand of gothic art I grew up around thanks to my mom’s obsession with the Sandman series, and other grandiose, gothic pieces of animation like Cool World.

Inuyasha’s fight against Yura quickly endured me to the titular character as well, especially because of the Blades of Blood attack that he uses in this fight (and then maybe two more times ever again in the series, much to my chagrin). As a kid who was growing my hair back out, having always identified as a long-haired boy up to that point, I ended up connecting both with Yura’s desire to claim Inuyasha’s hair (and hers, for that matter), but to Inuyasha as a long-haired boy that girls were always complimenting on my hair and even sometimes expressing jealousy towards it. Razor-wire hair being used as a weapon, and blades of blood in retaliation set the tone for a gothic action serial I was interested in seeing more of; so before I even get into talking about the characters, which I think represent the main appeal of Inuyasha beyond its overall aesthetic, I want to talk about how it achieves its unique tone so exquisitely in the anime adaptation.

Takahashi Rumiko-sensei has stated that she didn’t really do any extra research into the time period or mythology in developing the story of Inuyasha, and I think that works to the show’s benefit in the same way that Harry Potter benefitted from drawing on lots of common fantasy tropes, while re-contextualizing and explaining them for the sake of its audience. Whereas a film like Takahata Isao-sama’s Pom Poko makes countless specific references to Japanese myths which might not mean anything to foreign audiences that don’t understand them, Inuyasha only vaguely pulls from the general idea of some mythologies, but doesn’t expect you to even know that it’s making a reference in the first place. 

We are quickly made to understand that there are demonic, humanoid versions of common animals running rampant in this world, with Inuyasha himself being, as his name translates to, a dog-demon--although he’s only half-demon, with a human mother and a tragic backstory. There is a sort-of centipede demon lady in the first episode, a big dude taken over by a demon crow parasite in episode two, and the small fox demon Shippo who joins the main crew in episode nine, and involves Inuyasha in a fight against the sadistic humanoid Lightning Brothers, who seem to simply have lightning powers as their thing. The character design logic is not dissimilar from other shounen action stories as far as introducing themed villains to fight in each arc; but the consistent use of animal and nature themes, and Takahashi-sensei’s striking sense of era-reminiscent but mostly badass-looking costumes creates an atmosphere unique to Inuyasha on the design front; at least until we started getting anime like Nurarihyon no Mago in the 2010s or, more recently and with an even-more modern take on the style, Demon Slayer.

Takahashi-sensei’s manga has a unique way of conveying tension in its layouts and in the expressions of the characters beyond the use of horror tropes in the designs of the monsters; but to me, the story truly came to life when it was brought to animation by Studio Sunrise starting in the year 2000. Considering that the manga had already been going for four years by that point, and that the show’s producers were extremely serious about the responsibility of handling a long-form shounen adaptation from a manga legend, they had plenty of time to develop a strong grasp on the manga’s story and aesthetic, and to realize new avenues of its potential in animation.

As per usual from studio Sunrise, Inuyasha features consistently on-model animation and rarely feels restricted in what it is willing to realize through motion. At worst, the show just looks okay and maybe kind of flat in some scenes--but most of it looks pretty awesome, with no shortage of individual cuts that I found myself mentally snapshotting as I completed the series for the sake of this video. The most impressive thing to me is the consistent variety in atmosphere drawn out of the setting, which perhaps best showcases the breadth of emotional tonality which this story is capable drawing upon. At heart, Inuyasha is a romantic action epic--a historically-inspired, horror-tinged, relationship-driven story set in multiple time periods, with a main character who lives a double-life as a student in modern Japan and a warrior of justice in ancient Japan, while navigating her feelings toward a stubborn asshole that she helps to become the hero he wants to be deep down with her influence. So yeah, there’s a lot going on--especially since I just sort of slipped in there that Inuyasha isn’t even the actual main character of his own show, which is Kagome--but we’ll get into her a bit later.

Inuyasha is far from the only anime series with verdant forested backdrops and plenty of hut villages in the mountains--but the way the designs feel so at home in that background helps to sell the reality of it in this show. Kagome’s outfit is considered out-of-place and immodest by the people she meets in the past, but the green accents on white blend right into to the backgrounds, and the complimentary-colored red kerchief also matches her to Inuyasha’s preposterously big red outfit. Inuyasha’s clothes help him to look stronger than he might have with his skinny-strong anime built, and stands out against everything as a matter of course, almost like a trap to convince you that this guy has to unmistakably be the main character just because he draws so much attention. I greatly appreciate how purple, pink and teal are used to distinguish Miroku, Sango and Shippo, without breaking too far from the color scheme of the other protagonists, and overall I just think the color work is almost always perfect in this series. Once we get into the final season, I do feel that the digitally-drawn and manipulated backgrounds and lighting effects leave a weaker impression than the previous show--if only because Inyasha represents cel animation at the tail end of its life, and expresses a mastery of the medium which the final season doesn’t quite express over then-newer digital drawing.

More importantly even than the animation to establishing the Inuyasha vibe is the iconic soundtrack from Wada Kaoru-san, who remains among my favorite anime composers, and the master of majestically dark, adventurous and anciently-inspired music. Wada-san was the direct understudy of one of Japan’s best-known film composers, Godzilla scorer Ikufube Akira-san, and it definitely shows in the ways that he uses heavy chord progressions to create grand and monstrous sounds--especially on OSTs like Juubei Ninpuuchou, Casshern Sins, and 3x3 Eyes, which could also maybe be seen as one of the manga that makes sense as having lead to the possibility of Inuyasha. 

Wada-san got his start in classical composition, and as such was familiar mostly with Western instruments, only becoming interested in traditional Japanese instruments and songwriting styles after starting to research and incorporate them for the Juubei Ninpuuchou soundtrack. He delved further and further into that research in the 90s, and brought out all the stops to explore those instruments and compositional styles fully on the huge Inuyasha soundtrack. Every year, Wada-san would be given the chance to completely re-compose the entire soundtrack too, changing song arrangements and using different instruments to make subtle adjustments to the iconic themes that drive us through the show. However many tracks and versions of those may be used over the course of the series, with 193 episodes, you are going to hear all of them enough to know them pretty well, and I couldn’t be happier than to have this particular OST kicking around in my noggin. It’s inspiring, intriguing and endlessly enjoyable to hear. I won’t say every single song in the show is a masterpiece that I’d listen to independently of its placement within the series, but the stuff that sticks out is iconic even amid Wada-san’s already very excellent oeuvre.

Wada-san’s research into traditional composition sells the legitimacy of the setting in the areas where Takahashi-sensei wasn’t concerned with it. Fans of other soundtracks which pull from classical Japanese melodies like Touhou will recognize elements in Wada-san’s compositions; and the use of creepy-sounding old flutes and whistles to lay in the tension of deadly encounters in the misty mountainside may be familiar to fans of old samurai movies. Wada-san’s melodic sensibility keeps even the most atmospheric and spooky tracks memorable. Some of the most iconic spooky-sounding soundtrack music I can think of appears in this show, and I’m surprised it isn’t more widely imitated or referenced. 

Perhaps the most easily-conjured track from the series is the sweepingly dramatic main theme that plays during every next-episode preview, and during big heroic moments in the story. Comparable to the main themes from Log Horizon or The Legend of Zelda in its grand impression of adventure, the Inuyasha theme leaves a unique impression with the bombastic underlay of layers and layers of Eastern and Western instruments building an epic swell that emblematically represents Wada-san’s ambitions with the show’s sound. Perhaps equally impressive is the short jingle that plays over the episode title cards and condenses most of those feelings into a few seconds.

So Inuyasha looks and sounds really cool and unique, which might be enough to carry a short piece of arthouse animation, but obviously didn’t compel the popularity of this series worldwide for 193 episodes on its own. I’d also be hard-pressed to say that its story was the most important aspect of the show’s popularity either, for reasons which we’ll get into as we go; but I do think that Takahashi Rumiko-sensei’s expertise in character relationship dynamics established through all her years of writing romantic comedy ended up being the most compelling aspect of Inuyasha’s writing, and also a big part of how Inuyasha developed one of anime’s most androgynous audiences of the 2000s, and became one of the most popular shounen manga adaptations ever with women. 

In my experience as a participant in anime fan circles in the United States from 2002 until now, Inuyasha has always been a lot more popular with young women than with young men, and especially remembered for some of its stellar ending themes which remain eternal karaoke classics at anime conventions. Having transitioned my own gender identity, I would put myself within that category as well; and even though Inuyasha was an obvious hero for me to follow as a long-haired kid with an aggressive way of speaking and a love for action cartoons, it was Kagome that snuck up on me and ended up being one of the earliest girl characters I was able to form a connection with, since I wasn’t actively avoiding the series out of fear for being caught liking a show with a girl protagonist as I had been growing up. 

Kagome is the voice of reason and justice in Inuyasha, and her own tendency toward aggressive emotional reaction to Inuyasha’s being an asshole was actually even more relatable than Inuyasha’s own tendency toward unreasonable pride-driven communication. Inuyasha looks cool and eventually does tons of badass heroic stuff, but it’s only after a long period of Kagome’s influence that he starts to turn around as a person and become more casual, humble and naturally caring. In that way, while Inuyasha was physically admirable to me then as someone as effeminate-looking as I was, but still able to jump across rooftops and slice demons up with his nails, Kagome was even more admirable to me as a person for her natural heroism, reasonableness and dignity. She was also one of the first anime characters I had to admit to myself I was attracted to, even though I felt like she was way older than me at the time since I was only in middle school and still less than five feet tall, while Kagome was fifteen and looked like a young adult. The rest of the cast is attractive as well, but Kagome is certainly my favorite.

It is worth noting that while women tend to play equal roles and usually outnumber the men in Takahashi-sensei’s work, none of her writing has ever been for women’s magazines, nor were any of her works nearly as popular with women as Inuyasha beforehand. This might seem surprising at first, considering Urusei Yatsura, Maison Ikkoku and Ranma ½ are all romantic comedies, which are mostly marketed toward women in the United States these days--however, besides that each of those came out before the anime and manga boom in the US (whereas Inuyasha was a touchstone part of it), Urusei Yatsura and Ranma were also very perverted sex-comedies with frequent nudity--which isn’t even something you’re usually allowed to have in mainstream American media aimed at the demographic which Takahashi-sensei was writing for of primarily teenaged boys. 

At the age I was first getting into anime and manga, I was personally quite avoidant of sexual content in media, and even ended up being somewhat taken aback by the breastiness of even the Inuyasha manga, considering that the adaptation had removed all nudity completely. I think this was a wise decision, not only because it probably made it possible at all to run the show on prime time TV in Japan, but also because it could run on TV in the US a few years later, and appeal to a slightly younger demographic like myself who would only start to become comfortable with the presence of nudity in manga after actually buying the first volume of Ranma ½  later into 2003. While I don’t think the presence of nudity as used in the Inuyasha manga would’ve necessarily made the series less popular with women, as it isn’t exactly used as fanservice, I do think that anime’s reputation for perversion combined with that presence of nudity might have lead more women to make negative assumptions about the show’s intentions in the United States.

Inuyasha’s first episode is one of my favorite isekai openers, and perhaps the most actually horrific in the series. 15 year-old Kagome lives at a shrine with a superstitious grandpa who believes in old Japanese religious ideas of magic, whereas his modern daughter, grandson and granddaughter take a more rational approach toward life--at least until the day she Kagome pulled into a well by a naked half-lady centipede demon and emerges deep in the past. There, Kagome learns from an old woman named Kaede that she bears a strong resemblance to the woman’s older sister: a shrine maiden named Kikyo, who was killed fifty years ago by her lover, the half-demon Inuyasha, whom she pinned to a tree and put to sleep with a sacred arrow in her dying moments. When the centipede demon returns to the village to terrorize it in search of the sacred jewel which it found inside of Kagome’s body, she bargains with Inuyasha to unseal him in exchange for destroying the monster, and he obliges--but by the reaction of Kaede to Inuyasha being set loose, it seems like Kagome has actually freed an even bigger villain to face.

I remember being surprised when I first saw the beginning of the story by reading the manga with just how sadistic and villainously Inuyasha is portrayed at the very start; though this discrepancy against his quick turn in tendency toward heroism is explained as we discover the truth behind his backstory a couple of volumes later. Initially, Inuyasha seems threatening and dangerous, and is inclined to play into the stereotypes that others throw at him in bitterness over their accusations--however, Kagome quickly senses him as immature and dishonest in the extent of the villainy which he projects. 

Even though Inuyasha is supposed to be like 200 years old, because of the way that demons age, the story essentially treats him as an adolescent male who is peer to Kagome in many ways; though he does have a certain wisdom in matters pertaining to what he understands by instinct as a dog creature. His older brother, Sesshomaru, is presented as a mature demon by comparison and is much older than Inuyasha. His appearance gives us the first sense of where Inuyasha stands in the grander scheme of demonhood--seen as weak by many because of his half-human physiology, but capable of massive potential thanks to his father having been one of the most legendary powerhouses of recent demon history.

Heritage plays a major role in Inuyasha’s theming, with both Kagome and Inuyasha essentially granted their world-saving powers by virtue of, in the former case, happening to have the holy soul of a time-transcending priestess, and in the latter, being the son of the most badass demon ever mentioned in the series and gifted with a sword made from his fang. Perhaps Takahashi-sensei connected with this theme as she herself was drawing from the power of her cultural ancestry in constructing the story, as it certainly connects well with the setting in that way, even if Kagome has been accused of being an over-powered mary sue thanks to her innate and largely unchanging ability to defeat most enemies just by virtue of her latent power. I will argue that Inuyasha does a good job of rounding out Kagome with flaws that fans of the character may actually find too relatable to necessarily register as flaws, but we’ll get to that.

The story is really set in motion at the end of the second episode, when Kagome accidentally shatters the Sacred Jewel in her attempt to stop a demon crow from flying off with it, and the fragments end up scattering to the four winds of Japan to be sought by power-hungry demons all over. Thus, Kagome makes it her duty to clean up this mess, which will only make life harder for the humans that are already being hunted by demons all the time; and Inuyasha tags along with her under the pretense that he wanted the jewel in the first place because it should be able to make him into a fully-fledged demon, which his relationship to Kagome will eventually lead him to completely forget about. The quest to reclaim a bunch of power-up crystal macguffins is a tried and true formula for long-form adventure serialization, and for the while that Inuyasha sticks to that format straightforwardly, it does it about as well as any other show in the genre.

Episode two also introduces Inuyasha’s most subtly scandalous and ingenious gimmick, in that Kaede saddles Inuyasha with a magic necklace which forces him instantly to the ground at Kagome’s command to ‘sit.’ Considering Inuyasha’s aggressive personality and vastly greater physical strength over Kagome, the thought of having to travel with him might’ve been a lot scarier if not for the fact that Kagome has a way to instantly diffuse any tension between them and keep him completely at bay physically. Like a real dog, Inuyasha is someone that can only really understand a lesson that is taught through physical consequence, and his bad attitude is clearly in need of retraining from Kagome, who might as well be his owner after this point. It’s an incredibly cute way to give some balance to a relationship which might have been too physically aggressive for comfort in a shounen manga if every altercation wasn’t pretty innocently ended by causing Inuyasha just as much pain as he feels the need to constantly inflict on the weak.

Mostly, the early stories are carried by Takahashi-sensei’s consistent penchant for cool visuals and conceptual ideas behind the action; such as when Sesshomaru pulls a reality marble out of Inuyasha’s eye containing their father’s graveyard, whereupon he assumes his demon form to fight Inuyasha over his birthright sword atop their father’s corpse. I think this stands as one of the most iconic visual ideas in the series, and I really have to wonder if it might’ve influenced the conflict between Virgil and Dante and their fight at the end of Devil May Cry 3.

The three-episode arc with Sesshomaru introduces us to Inuyasha’s personal mythology, including the revelation that he was a sad, bullied momma’s boy in total contrast to the cold demon that he pretends he wants to be, and which his older brother actually is and believes his father to be--though his father’s relationship with Inuyasha’s mother suggests otherwise, which Sesshomaru refuses to think about and hates Inuyasha for reminding him of. We also meet Myoga, who is Inuyasha’s vassal and servant to his father since the time he was alive, and mostly exists in the story to dump exposition, occasionally act like a dirty old man (because for some reason Takahashi-sensei can’t help but slide those characters into all of her stories), and also to hit the road whenever the action starts.

Kagome ends up being the only one who can actually pull Tetsusaiga, the blade which can supposedly kill a hundred demons in one slash, from its resting place, but finds it rusted and useless. Inuyasha will spend some time learning that the sword basically only works in accordance with his honest instinctual intent, superceding the logic under which he thinks he operates. Basically, the more in-tune he is with his own intent, the better he can use Tetsusaiga, and of course his true intentions are always to protect the innocent--most especially his loved ones Kagome and Kikyo. Oh yeah, and it isn’t long before Kikyo gets brought back to life.

Kagome, Kikyo and Inuyasha comprise one of Takahashi-sensei’s most conceptually interesting love triangles, what with two of them being functionally the same person, and the original only present in the story as a literal zombie created from her unresting soul being manipulated by the main villain back into the story just to complicate Inuyasha’s life. Driven by resentment, Kikyo as she exists now wants Inuyasha dead, and couldn’t care less about the life of Kagome, as she no longer connects to her former virtuous emotions. Kagome is sympathetic to Kikyo’s circumstances, and also to Inuyasha’s attachment to her; but she can’t help herself but to become jealous of Inuyasha’s tendency to instantly rush to Kikyo’s side at the mention of her name as though his relationship with Kagome suddenly doesn’t matter. Removed from the fantastical elements of how this relationship dynamic was established, I’m sure that the actual state of this relationship is something a lot of people can relate to more specifically.

A lot of internet discourse I saw around Inuyasha in the early period of its popularity had to do with girls who seethingly despised either Kikyo or Kagome for complicating the other’s relationship with Inuyasha--which I think is fantastic. Later on, the show would truly start pushing into Twilight book territory with the introduction of a wolf demon named Koga, who has the hots for Kagome and starts trying to lay claim on her right at a point when she’s starting to settle into a decent relationship with Inuyasha. While I don’t think Koga ended up being that strong of a rival to Inuyasha for reasons I’ll get into later, some of the girls who liked him certainly discussed the relationship dynamic in similar terms to the Edward vs. Jacob team sports inspired by the Twilight books and films.

Finally learning the truth behind Inuyasha and Kikyo’s past also changes the tone of the series, as it exonerates both of their villainy as the manipulation of Naraku--and in so doing establishes him instantly as the main bad guy of the whole show. As the story goes, the kind priestess would tend to a mortally-burned man that lived alone in a cave, and eventually become consumed with jealousy for anyone else hogging the attention of the one light in his life. As such, he allowed thousands of demons to take residence within his body, and became more so an embodiment of the collective malicious intent of all the evil spirits within him than anything resembling his original self. Even though he sets his plans in motion supposedly for the sake of owning Kikyo’s heart, his intentions are already so tainted by those of the demons that he really only ends up continually getting her killed, and keeping her at arms length even after having brought her back to life because the evil within him is actively trying to root out any semblance of humanity left inside his heart.

Before we meet Naraku though, Inuyasha finds himself involved in avenging the family of the young fox demon, Shippo, who becomes the next major member of the team. Shippo has always been the most controversial character in the series because, beyond the tragic circumstances which brought him into the story, he is a weak and somewhat bratty child, who brings a lighter tone to the scenes in which he’s involved and doesn’t have any strong connection to the central narrative; meaning that episodes which focus on him tend to be pretty unmemorable filler content. He also has the most obnoxious voice in what could already be a somewhat straining English dub--which isn’t my preferred way to watch the show, but I’ll go into the Japanese voice cast later. Personally, I never minded Shippo because he’s cute and fun, and I was probably exactly the sort of younger audience he was meant to make the show just a little bit more inviting for. Shippo also contributes well to Inuyasha’s characterization because he is constantly bullied by Inuyasha simply for being weak, as a matter of extreme tough love on Inuysasha’s part; but also tends to think through situations more so than the hot-tempered dog demon does because his lack of strength forces him to approach situations with trickery.

Inuyasha’s fight against the lightning brothers also represents to me height of Inuyasha as a standard episodic battle shounen. The characters are sadistically cruel and perverse, which makes them threatening and scary, and gets us really rooting to see our main characters take them down. While there are other episodic stories before and after this arc and scattered over the rest of the show, and most of it consistently operates in the format of mini-arcs lasting two or three episodes, the introduction of a central villain in the coming episodes steadily changes the tone of the series until it eventually gets too far away from the tone of horrifically-tinged action-adventure with which it began, to really fall into the same genre.

With the vague threat of Naraku’s manipulations hanging in the background, Inuyasha steadily rounds out the rest of its cast with characters that have their own beef leading them to team up in the quest to stop him from amassing jewel shards. Miroku the Monk’s backstory pulls a tragic twist on the theme of inheritance: his grandfather, who fought against Naraku in previous forms, was cursed by the demon with a wind tunnel power which, while nearly unstoppable at sucking in and destroying anything in its path, also slowly eats away at its holder until death. Miroku watched his father be swallowed by his wind tunnel, and wants to avenge him before his own inevitable demise.

Being more knowledgeable about dealing with demons than the other heroes, Miroku sort of fills in the expositional space left by Kaede as the characters venture farther afield of the main village on their regular travels. Whereas Inuyasha’s dog-like traits are more on the side of the innocent and puppy-like, Miroku is a true hound dog--constantly flirting with and trying to cop a feel on every pretty girl he comes across. I’m not sure if Takahashi-sensei would actually be capable of writing a manga without any perverted characters, and Miroku is presented in a more toned-down and believable way than some of those from her previous works, but nonetheless is a definite bastard in his own way that he’ll have to grow out of, in the same way that Inuyasha has to learn to be a quieter, more honest and modest hero.

Rounding out the main cast is Sango the demon slayer, who is introduced alongside her badass family right before all of them are wiped out by Naraku’s manipulation of Sango’s brother Kohaku. After Kohaku is supposedly dead, Naraku brings him back without his memories to continue manipulating him, insisting that he cannot have his memories brought back as they are so traumatic that they would madden him into death instantly. This arc made a pretty good setup for Sango’s motivations and place in the story, and while her personality is sort of bland compared to the other main characters, her no-nonsense quiet hardass attitude is certainly likable, and she rounds out the cast nicely. Unfortunately, it isn’t long after Sango’s introduction that Inuyasha starts to drag in a way that the anime series almost never completely recovers from--but that’s going to take some real digging into, so let me wrap up more of my thoughts about the establishing arcs.

When I was the most into Inuyasha in 2003, it may well have been my favorite anime I was watching at the time, having started to come down from my heavy investment in Yu-Gi-Oh!. As the year went on, my cousin and I continued learning about anime and manga, and eventually Monthly Shounen Jump and Cartoon Network’s Saturday-night action block leading up to Adult Swim introduced me to new favorites like Naruto and Rurouni Kenshin; while I was discovering loves of my own through graphic novel and DVD purchases, such as Jing: the King of Bandits, Rave Master, and the first anime which I remember actually considering to deserve the title of my favorite, Samurai X: Trust and Betrayal, the prequel OVA to Rurouni Kenshin.

Inuyasha was compelling in part because it wasn’t actually just immediately lovable in all ways, but complicated and kind of challenging in certain ways to completely love--which makes sense metaphorically, considering the nature of Kagome’s relationship with Inuyasha the character. The show is scarier, more threatening and with a less instantly heroic protagonist even then Yusuke Urameshi, the punk hero of Yuu Yuu Hakusho, which ran alongside it on Adult Swim. Both shows felt mature to me at that age, and would feel immature to me by the time I actually reached the same age as their main characters, having long moved on to the likes of Neon Genesis Evangelion and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya as favorites. In returning to Yuu Yuu Hakusho as an adult, I was shocked by how insistently watchable that series remains, and how compelling the character arc of Yuusuke is right to the end, even if some of the later arcs don’t reach the same highs as the most iconic ones in the middle.

Inuyasha was a lot scarier for me to return to, because even when I was a kid I had gotten sick of it somewhere around halfway through, and stopped watching completely. Years later, when I was passing by my brother’s room with the TV on, I happened to catch what might very well be the worst-looking episode of the entire show late into the Band of Seven arc, which I had never seen before--and it really left an impression like I’d be embarrassed to know I’d once loved this show if I ever tried watching it again. I was surprised, then, when I found the first episode even more exciting than I remembered it, and hesitated to try and continue for a long while. 

In the intervening years, my brother Victor, who bonded with his wife Hope over their mutual love of anime, has insisted that Inuyasha holds up as a comfy bedtime show they can leave on in the background and enjoy passively--which makes perfect sense to me. I’ve already mentioned that I could listen to Wada Kaoru-san’s soundtrack forever, and while the English dub was grating enough that even its own advertising made fun of the main characters constantly shouting one-another’s names, the Japanese cast is easy enough on the ears, and the dialog is simple enough that I probably wouldn’t need subtitles to keep track of what’s happening with my very limited knowledge of the language.

Yamaguchi Kappei-san was clearly frontlined to play Inuyasha based on already having performed the voice of male Ranma from the extremely successful Ranma ½ anime. To me, he makes perfect sense as someone whose ultra high-pitched but oddly rough voice simultaneously sounds endlessly weirdly childlike--particularly in his performance of Tick Jefferson from Baccano!--but also like the older gentleman that he was getting to be by this point, which perfectly captures the strange limbo of oldness and adolescence in which Inuyasha is trapped. I don’t necessarily adore Yamaguchi-san’s performance in this show, as it is deliberately grating to match Inuyasha’s personality, and likewise I don’t find Yukino Satsuki-san’s performance of Kagome all that noteworthy beyond that she straightforwardly conveys the character well.

While I wouldn’t say that the quality of her performance stood out any more so than that of Yukino-san, Kuwashima Houko-san’s unique and somewhat soothing voice as Sango brimmed with her reserved but explosive emotion, and was my favorite to listen to in the show, with the smooth charisma that Narita Ken-san brought to Sesshoumaru placing a close second. The cuteness of Shippo's performance by Watanabe Kumiko-san is also far less cloying and over-the-top than the English voice, keeping the character a lot more tolerable. 

I remember being pretty confused about the current nature of Kikyo’s presence in the story as per her revival originally, but interested in the backstory between her and Inuyasha and how it finally justified him as more of a sympathetic victim of circumstance, completely posturing that he was ever really a bad dude at any point just because of how hurt he felt by what he thought was Kikyo’s betrayal. Kagome only becomes more likable herself as her relationship with Inuyasha begins to reveal her hilarious personality flaws, best observed by outsiders trying to keep track of what’s going on in her life.

Every time Kagome goes off to the other world, her grandpa makes up a bizarre reason for her absence, usually involving disease. She develops a reputation for being sickly and absent, hardly able to keep up with class when she’s actually around, and completely uncaring about anything going on with her so-called friends and classmates, who are always curious about just what the hell this strange girl is getting up to. Kagome has such a rational and dry way of speaking that no-one can ever convince themselves she is really out of her mind, but the more perspective others have on her relationship, the more they see it as deeply toxic and totally taking control of Kagome’s life; but it’s also way more obvious to them than it seem to be to her that her double-life with a wildman which the girls at school imagine only in horror, is the only thing occupying any of Kagome’s attention whatsoever. It is in her visits home that we see how, deep down, Kagome is self-absorbed to the point of oblivion, self-justified by the sense of importance behind her work in the past.

When Sango is introduced, it doesn’t take long for the story to start positioning her as a love interest for Miroku. Watching the show as an adult, I didn’t feel like I totally understood her feelings for him until she finally spells the reasoning in a way during the final arc, but as a kid, I was always a fan of the structure of an adventuring party comprised of two couples. I definitely felt the sense even then, though, that the two of them only seemed to be posed as a couple because they were the other boy and girl of eligible age in the part--and it just seems like an inevitability of the story’s structure before Sango had even come close to starting to work through her frustrations with the good priest’s perverted nature.

Right around episode thirty of the anime is the point at which I feel the overall status quo of the story has just about been fully established, with all of the main crew set up with motivations for chasing a clear main villain and most of the side characters involved in that central plot as well, the entire show basically converges on the lynchpin of needing to kill Naraku, whose majority stake in the sacred jewel by this point has pushed it into the background as a plot device instead of its driving macguffin. Going into the next stretch of the show, Inuyasha establishes new standards in tone and storytelling which subtly shift it farther into the lane of a traditional shounen action series, and also rapidly run my interest in it into the ground.

The first thing that I remember seriously bothering me about Inuyasha even when I was a kid who loved the show was the persistent use of Naraku’s poison insects in battle to make Miroku almost completely useless for most of the fights. The Wind Tunnel is a seriously badass concept, and while it might’ve been overpowered for most encounters, the fact that Miroku basically can’t ever use it simply because he risks inhaling toxic bugs that will spread his condition faster instantly deflates the ability’s coolness, and relegates it only to mattering the few times it puts Miroku’s life at risk. It would’ve been something if Miroku was given another powerful ability, and I appreciate that he is often useful in scenarios where talismans and prayers are more effective than combat, but the fact that he spends most action scenes using his staff as a flyswatter was a huge disappointment to me from early on.

Kagome’s arrows and Sango’s awesome giant boomerang are presented as pretty dangerous when used, but their chances to attack end up being extremely contextual, and neither of them ever gets any new moves or weapons to use in battle. Sango rides in on the badass transforming battle cat Kilala, after whom my family’s now nineteen year-old cat was named, and looks awesome kicking demon ass, but still mostly ends up relegated to dealing with fodder while Inuyasha fights pretty much every serious battle in the series.

Inuyasha and Sesshomaru are the only characters who really show significant growth in their abilities, and continue to pose a threat both to one-another and to Naraku as their allegiances and intentions shift over the course of the series. Inuyasha spends a lot of time learning the Wind Scar ability, which allows him to see the collision of energy between himself and his enemies, and then to cut through it with explosive power that can indeed cut hundreds of demons in one slice. Right after that, he then goes through another arc of learning the even-more-powerful backlash wave, which is… basically the same thing. After that it’s quite some time before the sword begins rapidly gaining abilities and forms during the show’s final arcs; but for a long stretch of the show, almost all Inuyasha would fight with is the backlash wave, wind scar, and iron reaver soul stealer, which really just amounted to three different versions of a yellow energy beam. I had the same problem with Ranma ½ that the special attacks are overall pretty boring, and while the Inuyasha attacks at least have more memorable names and effects, I got sick of seeing them all pretty quickly in the show’s midsection.

Shounen stories which start off episodically and start to run out of ideas or drop in popularity tend to receive encouragement from the editors to establish a central villain and dive into a larger story arc. In cases like Rurouni Kenshin or Yuu Yuu Hakusho, this lead to the most popular and withstanding arcs of the entire series, in the form of the Kyoto and Dark Tournament arcs--but for me, the fixation on Naraku and the attempt to establish a villain team based around him completely ruined my interest in Inuyasha over the course of forty or fifty-odd episodes, as I drifted out of keeping up with it.

Even though there were episodes as late as ninety which I vaguely remembered having seen before on my rewatch of the series, I was shocked by how many important characters I’d completely forgotten. Naraku’s clones, such as Kagura, the red-eyed kimono-wearing lady who rides around on a giant folding fan, or Kanna, the little white-haired girl with a mirror who spends most of the show simply holding that mirror in front of Naraku while he watches stuff happen after her introduction, had completely slipped from my memory. These aren’t the only clones of Naraku sort of spawned en-masse in the show’s midsection, but between the ones who stick around for a while and the ones who are dealt with quickly, none of them has any kind of personality or is memorable in the slightest. 

Inuyasha’s villains were never particularly deep in their motivations, but at least they were distinct entities from one-another before the establishment of Naraku. Even though he is apparently too hard for the main characters to kill, he also seems to think that fighting them himself is too much of a risk, and so he keeps sending other people to try and kill Inuyasha--but if Naraku couldn’t do it himself, why the hell would someone created from a fraction of his power even pose a threat? The ineffectuality of Naraku’s plans made him feel less threatening, and the repetition of different enemies always acting out those plans rapidly became tiring.

Koga and the wolf tribe made for a somewhat-decent distraction from the Naraku business, having their own reason to hate him without wanting to team up with Inuyasha’s gang, and with Koga rapidly ending up as his love rival over Kagome. Koga, while chivalrous, is toxically possessive, and doesn’t impress Kagome, even if Inuyasha’s jealousy over him also irritates her. I want to like this relationship dynamic, but to me Koga is just a bit limp as a rival to Inuyasha. Even though a wolf demon ought to be at least bigger than a dog demon, Koga is physically on-par with Inuyasha--but looks incredibly less powerful thanks to his light, generic armor and dark, unnoteworthy hair as compared to Inuyasha’s overwhelming design. You could say maybe that Koga was meant to appeal to a different type of fan from Inuyasha, but I think Takahashi-sensei could’ve done a lot to balance their rivalry so that you wouldn’t end up feeling like a chump if you were backing the Koga horse.

Koga just doesn’t pose enough of a threat to Inuyasha. He isn’t quite polite or kind enough to seem like Kagome could really fall for him, and if anything she practically uses him to push Inuyasha and test his emotions more so than caring about Koga’s feelings. Koga is kind of a simp, and just doesn’t seem as tough or practical as Inuyasha in combat situations. One of my favorite things about the character animation during action in this show is how the extreme speeds are conveyed by the hyper-movement of animation frames--and introducing a rival who is specifically supposed to be even faster than the already very quick-looking Inuyasha was at least a good idea; but that Koga is only boosted thanks to jewel shards in his legs and doesn’t have any attacks nearly as brutal as the backlash wave makes him once again seem significantly weaker than Inuyasha. Koga quickly ends up more of a reluctant ally as the show goes on, but ultimately ended up being a forgettable character to me, with his own girlfriend eventually written in to keep him from just getting cucked the whole show.

After this point, I can’t say that I particularly care about anything else that happened in the original five-year Inuyasha run before the series came back for the final season in 2009. The first time a full-on filler arc got injected into the adaptation from episodes 63-65, I remember actually finding it a relief from what by then had become to me a pretty grueling slog of convolution considering itself a storyline. Most of Naraku’s schemes just amount to him getting more evil and more powerful as more and more of the rest of the cast turns against him, including some of his scheming underlings. Every plot development is reiterated eternally and never concluded at all within the stretch of the original show. You could literally skip from like episode forty of the original series straight into the final season, and I’m convinced you wouldn’t have any trouble knowing exactly what is going on.

While I found some of Inuyasha’s filler content and side-stories mildly entertaining on my way towards the halfway point, the whopping thirteen-episode filler fjord which the series falls into in episode eighty-nine, followed by the nineteen-episode Band of Seven arc, was the period during which Inuyasha jumped the shark for me and never came down until the final season. Most of the filler episodes are just very bland and mundane fanservicey what-if type scenarios involving the characters, but the Band of Seven arc is a perfect distillation of Takahashi-sensei’s weaknesses in constructing compelling shounen action arcs.

I would be honestly stunned if even a hardcore Inuyasha fan could remember the names of more three of the band of seven off the top of their heads. Sadistic villain gangs are a common basis for shounen action arcs, with excellent examples like the Phantom Troupe arc from Hunter X Hunter and Chapter Black arc from Yuu Yuu Hakusho, the Androids arc in Dragon Ball Z, Shishio’s group from Rurouni Kenshin, and even the group of assassins tailing Giorno’s gang through the middle of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure part five all being better examples of similar criminal gangs from manga that came before Inuyasha. Even more generic examples, such as the Beasts of Maze Castle from Yuu Yuu Hakusho or the dumbass Ginyuu force from Dragon Ball Z were more memorable than the Band of Seven, because they did the bare minimum of at least giving each of the bad guys a unique power and a fully-fledged fight against one of the heroes one-on-one, and had some semblance of a collective personality and comedic power gimmicks in the latter case.

Most of the band of seven are dispatched practically as soon as they’re introduced, and all of them spend more time acting like assholes then they do actually showing off any kind of cool abilities or fighting the main characters. At the very least, there were a couple of halfway-decent action scenarios and some cool imagery in this arc, such as a part where a river gets set on fire, but for the most part the band of seven are just a bunch of generic, boring villains with generic, boring powers that have generic, boring fights with Inuyasha. The leader of the gang looks like a guy who can actually rival Inuyasha’s power, and carries an even bigger dick-metaphor, but personality-wise he feels sort of like a lightning brother retread. To me, this entire arc’s existence seemed like an excuse to keep the manga’s wheels spinning when Takahashi-sensei was out of ways to keep building up Naraku for a while, and unfortunately the show doesn’t get better right away after it’s over.

It dives back into the main plot with a fake out death of Kikyo, which is undone just a few episodes later; Kagura ends up running around with this baby Naraku clone or something for a while and schemes against him, but it really doesn’t amount to much, and overall most of what’s added into the story beyond this point just complicates it rather than progressing it in any meaningful way. It almost feels like everything outside of Sango and Miroku finally becoming a couple later into the series was left deliberately unresolved by the end of the original run--in part because the final season starts resolving things right away and basically doesn’t stop for twenty-six episodes until everything has been satisfyingly taken care of.

Considering how much I didn’t enjoy the bulk of Inuyasha’s story, I’m kind of surprised how decent the final arc turned out. I think there could be a solid sixty-or-so-episode edit of Inuyasha trimming out the whole midsection which might be like a strong seven to a light eight to me. Instead, I feel very kind in considering Inuyasha a strong six to a light seven on the strength of the things I liked about it. I don’t doubt that it would be substantially easier to consume Inuyasha passively as a bedtime routine, rather than trying to watch it as an involving drama; but I don’t really tend to consume media that way, so it’s not much of a help for me as a viewer. As much as I appreciate the nostalgia factor of returning to Inuyasha here and there, I could never see myself watching all 193 episodes of it over again, and only did so to satisfy my curiosity over something I had left incomplete so long ago and wanted to know how it ended up ending.

Part of my curiosity over the final season was also on the account of having seen composer Wada Kaoru-san and Sunrise producer Suwa Michihiko-san at Otakon in 2019. Suwa-san emphasized the extreme importance of Inuyasha to Sunrise’s Studio 1, in particular for having made more money for the studio in the United States than Mobile Suit Gundam. Wada-san and Suwa-san discussed their friendship and the fun they had going to the after-recording parties with the cast every week, and also how Suwa-san would fund a paid company vacation for the entire staff somewhere every year, and really just kept emphasizing how much of an important meal ticket Inuyasha had been for everyone working on it; which is why they gave their all into keeping the quality up across all five years of its run, and then its final season years later. It seemed as though Suwa-san was partially there to talk about how the studio had been trying to get Takahashi-san to let them continue the anime series independently of the manga, so that the team can keep working on it--and not a year later did Yashahime get announced--but we’ll touch on that again at the end of the video.

I have a lot of appreciation for the fact that there was every incentive from Takahashi-sensei and the anime studio’s perspective to keep Inuyasha going for as long as possible ,with it being so profitable for so long; and I appreciate that an attempt was made on every part to keep telling fun stories with these lovable characters in this engrossing world which a lot of fans were probably eager to stay at home in forever, just like Kagome. I might have liked the show more if it were half the length, and maybe a lot of fans would have their own list of episodes that they just don’t care about or remember, but I’d bet that it’s somewhat different for each person. Even the really unmemorable stories have their visual moments, and still have that look and sound that wins half the show’s battle in the first place. 

I do not love the aesthetic of the final season as much as I do the original show, but I think that it made sense for the visual tone to make a sort of shift, and that the one it has fits with the story of this part very well. Everything looks a little cleaner, especially in the facial expressions, which are a bit cuter and closer to the look of the manga, and fit with the newfound clarity and focus of the story as it charges through plot points in a way it never even tried to before. Like the series before it, a lot of what’s added mostly just complicates the story for the sake of the characters getting more power-ups and having more reasons for encounters on their way to completing their character development; but by the end of the show, all of the main characters have completed their arcs and changed in some way, and all of the bad guys are individually dealt with one by one.

If you don’t know how Inuyasha ends and don’t want to be spoiled, skip ahead like two minutes--but if you’d much rather just know what the hell happens: Kikyo has Kagome shoot the sacred jewel out of her, killing her, and into Naraku, attempting to purify him, but it doesn’t work--so now the only thing that can do it is the purity of Kohaku’s soul or something. Eventually Naraku gets so evil that he turns into a giant spider and kidnaps Rin, so all of the surviving major characters group up to go inside of his body and destroy him. There is a ton of stuff about Inuyasha and Sesshomaru’s swords and naval-gazing about their father’s true intentions and how they have come to reflect those, basically all amounting to the logic behind why power-ups work when they do and don’t when they don’t, building up to the moment when Naraku tries to possess Kagome’s body, and Inuyasha’s ultimate allows him to remove his spirit, while Sessho’s is able to vanquish it. At least, that incarnation of it--the battle goes on, eventually the good guys win, everyone lives, and most importantly, the epilogue:

The sacred jewel disappears and so does the well, and Kagome is trapped back at home for three whole years. In that time, Miroku and Sango have three kids, Miroku and Inuyasha work as demon exterminators, Kohaku as a demon hunter, and Shippo is out training to be a stronger demon. Kagome graduates high school and then the well reappears in front of her--and of course she has to go back. Her mother understands, and so her family just tells everyone that she got married and moved away, while Kagome heads back to the feudal era to live with Inuyasha permanently. I think this makes perfect sense, given that she pretty much stopped caring about the modern world early into the show, and might not have ever bothered finishing high school if she wasn’t forced to. Mostly I think the point of the three-year gap was to show how the feelings of both characters held strong across that time, leading to Kagome’s decision, and it works--it’s good.

Inuyasha’s premise and parts of its plot may be appealing, but it’s really the particulars peppered all throughout which I think pull in and push people away. I think Tetsusaiga is one of the show’s better ideas--a unique design for a gigantic blade, which isn’t exactly easy to achieve--and also the most blatant use of a blade as a dick metaphor in media history--what with the thing having a standard flaccid mode in which it spends most of its time, only getting huge in the face of instinctual emotional reactions. At first, he spends a lot of time swinging it around and practicing with it--but as the sword evolves, it becomes even more particularly reactive to his circumstances, and can even burn him if he overdoes it. The sword goes through a bunch of forms in the later part of the show, which I think is cool and adds some kind of stakes to the action in a way that it rarely exists in the show after the twentieth time you’ve seen a village entirely lain to waste by demons; but I wish that all of the rapid development which happens in the last stretch of the story had come much sooner.

Even though I think all of the other characters could’ve had more personal mythology and powers, Inuyasha is a lot of fun to see fleshed out, especially early on when we’re learning about things like how he loses his demon powers during the new moon, or how his outfit is resistant to flames. There’s just a whole lot of cool little ideas in the show, often that last just a moment, but are clever or cool in a way that reminds me of how big Takahashi-sensei’s imagination is. First meeting iconic demon cat Kilala or seeing the dragon pinned to a mountainside by a giant fang in the second ending theme are incredibly inspiring design moments. I always got a kick out of the scenes wherein Kagome is being interrogated by her classmates and gets the appropriate social reaction to her initially-toxic relationship. I also love that Inuyasha ends up being friends with her little brother and meeting the family and friends before the end, even if none of them really understands what the hell his deal is, nor does he understand her world at all. 

On the other hand, I have to talk about Rin for a minute. I would argue that the arc introducing Sesshomaru from episodes five through seven of Inuyasha is probably the most memorable one in the entire show. Sesshomaru looks awesome, has a hardass personality and makes the perfect rival to his younger brother--and their fight on their father’s corpse rules. That said, his cold and sociopathic personality doesn’t leave room for him to do much other than keep challenging Inuyasha to fights whenever they’re around each-other. Initially, he is brought back as part of Naraku’s scheme to use him to eliminate Inuyasha--but Sessho ends up disliking and turning against Naraku, though he isn’t actively pursuing him to kill him at first. 

Sesshomaru is such a popular character that he obviously needed something to do in the story, and so about thirty episodes in, he suddenly stumbles upon a little girl lying dead in the forest. Because he has been given a sword whose only ability seems to be bringing people back to life by way of cutting down the agents of death which come to take their souls to the other world, he decides to test it out by bringing this girl back to life--and I guess her vibe just ends up clicking with him or something, because he decides to let her follow him around along with Jaken from then on. At this point in the show, this seems completely out-of-character and incomprehensible from Sesshomaru, and so even as a kid it was impossible for me not to think of this as the most ham-fisted imaginable approach to humanizing him.

From that point, Sesshomaru’s arc is predictably about learning what it means to care about someone and to want to fight to protect them, which draws him closer to understanding and even to some degree accepting his younger brother. It’s a long and winding road, but predictable, in the same way that all the relationships in this show are. When the relationship of Sango and Miroku first started being suggested, it felt just as strained to me, given how much of an issue she seemed to have with him, and how much the show was leaning into it like no matter what it was going to happen because that’s just what’s been decided. In the final season, Sango expresses that she respects Miroku so much because he was willing to put his life on the line to protect her--and I thought that made perfect sense as a powerful reason that she would’ve developed feelings for him early on, even if that was hard to admit to herself given everything else about him.

Sesshomaru and Rin seem to be sort of sympathetic towards one-another, but mostly they just kind of happen to be around each-other. Sessho will do things for Rin and Rin for Sessho, and it’s never really clear what their relationship is meant to be exactly until you get to the new show, Yashahime, in which their daughter is a character. Now, I’ve heard people describe the 200 year-old Inuyasha’s relationship to fifteen year-old Kagome problematic, although at least they don’t really become official until she’s eighteen--but the even-older Sessho pretty much groomed this little girl into his bride from childhood. According to Inuyasha fan guides, Inuyasha is apparently the equivalent of being 15 in demon years, and Sessho is the equivalent of being nineteen--while Rin is nine at the start of the show. Apparently she’s at least in her late teens by the time she bears his children, but… I’m just saying, it’s fucking weird! But I’m eight years older than my husband, so I’m not gonna throw stones in this glass house.

Inuyasha was definitely taken as a somewhat transgressive piece of art just on sight by a lot of US audiences--and I recall reading no shortage of reports online from people who’d met bigoted comments about the show from family and friends. Most of the conversation was centered on the gender ambiguity of the male characters, with anime starting to develop an unfortunately undeserved reputation for being chock-full of long-haired effeminate men. It’s a show full of demons, men wearing makeup, girls in super-short skirts with noticeable breasts, and perverted characters groping young women’s asses or slurping blood from their napes. Suffice it to say, conservative American despised it. Luckily, it never attracted quite enough attention to spark any mass-media outrage--but it definitely became a show that lots of people had to act like they didn’t know about if they didn’t want trouble in their communities offline; which is a big part of how the anime community online got started in the first place.

I have a lot of appreciation for what Inuyasha added to the anime world, and for just how many people it brought together and brought into the fold of appreciating Japanese animation. My brother’s wife Hope and I both followed what she called the “Inuyasha to Rurouni Kenshin to Fullmetal Alchemist pipeline” in my anime alphabet video about FMA, and I have no doubt that Inuyasha was the start of the pipeline for more American women than any other anime of its era besides maybe Yu-Gi-Oh! (which was still more dominantly popular with boys). I’m still happy to hear the ending themes getting sung at Otakon karaoke, which I think is has always been possible because of the show favoring female singers with lower voices closer to the average American woman’s vocal range than most anime songs. 

Yashahime has been explicitly made possible because of the continued popularity of the original series worldwide, although I haven’t seen a whole lot of discussion of that show in my circles online, and I can only assume it’s been successful because they keep making more of it. I might be interested in watching that series, but having sampled it when it first started, I feel a bit wary about it. Nonetheless, when this video reaches fifty thousand views, I will make a point to watch not only all of the Inuyasha filler movies and talk about those, but also continue Yashahime through its two seasons, and even read through the whole of the original manga.

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