Inosuke's Powers From Demon Slayer Explained
May contain mild spoilers for "Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba" Season 2
Anime is more popular than ever, and right now, you'd be hard-pressed to name a more popular anime than the "Demon Slayer" franchise. The first season of the globally acclaimed "Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba" has reaped acclaim, and the full-length, rated-R movie "Demon Slayer: Mugen Train" recently hacked and slashed its way to the coveted spot of the highest-grossing movie in Japan – beating none other than Hayao Miyazaki's beloved "Spirited Away" in the process. Per Kotaku, its North American opening weekend was another sweet success, as it raked in a cool $19.5 million – the most successful showing ever for a foreign-language feature.
Even by anime standards, the world of "Demon Slayer" is full of strange and colorful characters. One of the most peculiar of them all is Inosuke Hashibira (voiced by Yoshitsugu Matsuoka and Bryce Papenbrook), a baby-faced but powerful member of the Demon Slayer Corps. Inosuke is something of a feral person, on account of growing up in the mountains without human interaction. This has left him with a slightly limited understanding of human nature, as well as a strange penchant for wearing a hollow boar's head as a somewhat creepy mask. Fortunately, there are also upsides. His peculiar upbringing, Demon Slayer training, and a host of other factors have made him one of the more powerful characters in a show full of powerful characters. So, what exactly can this literally and figuratively pig-headed young man do? Here are Inosuke's powers from Demon Slayer explained.
Inosuke is great with a sword
If it wasn't for the fact that he habitually conceals his face with a massive boar's head, Inosuke would fit the "arrogant swordsman" trope pretty well. He's a proud guy who's often obsessed with his own strength and feels a constant need to prove his mettle to others, usually by trying to fight them. Fortunately for him, his skills can usually – though not always – back up the checks his attitude writes.
Inosuke is an excellent swordsman whose self-created Breathing Style – the name for the show's supernatural swordsmanship styles – is known as Beast Breathing, and utilizes simple, powerful attacks and a relentless offensive. His special "Fang" attacks are extremely wild and aggressive, and his overall approach to fighting is very fitting to his boar-like appearance. To cap this all off, he executes his ruthless techniques with a pair of special, serrated Nichirin blades that tear instead of cutting neatly. All in all, this is not someone you'd want to face in a swordfight.
Inosuke's super-powerful senses
To keep with his animalistic theme, Inosuke's senses are almost supernaturally keen. This is, of course, par for the course for pretty much any Demon Slayer, but Inosuke takes things above and beyond the norm on essentially all fronts. Curiously for a guy whose approach to most of life's problems is to physically attack them, his sense of touch is particularly impressive, to the point that it provides him with a sort of "sixth sense."
By essentially using his sense of touch to read the tiny changes in the air around him, Inosuke can keep track of the people around him, and even their intentions. He has developed this into one of his rare non-slashy Beast Breathing techniques – a form known as Spatial Awareness – which allows him to focus and pretty much create an accurate 3D map of his surroundings and his enemies' exact locations and lines of sight. This is, of course, incredibly handy in the heat of the battle ... especially since there's no way that pig mask doesn't obscure his field of vision half the time.
Inosuke has superhuman physical powers
Without his mask, Inosuke looks like a boy band member, but whenever he dons the boar's head, he seems like power incarnate – which, in many ways, he is. From strength to speed, the Demon Hunter's physical prowess is outright amazing. It takes truly grievous injuries to get him to even consider stopping fighting – and even then, he's far, far more likely to press on than to call the medic. When he and Tanjiro Kamado (voiced by Natsuki Hamae and Zach Aguilar) face off against the spider demon father, Inosuke sustains terrifying injuries and heavy blood loss. Still, he keeps on fighting until there's no more fighting to be done ... and even then, he attempts to pick a fight with the Hashira warrior who just saved him.
Inosuke's most concerning physical ability is no doubt his outright creepy flexibility. Though it compliments his speed and strength very well, it can be fairly off-putting to see the boar-headed guy twisting so far backward that he can grab his own ankles. As fans who are up to date with the manga can readily attest, this is just the beginning of his highly inventive flexibility powers, too.
Poison is pretty much useless against Inosuke
Inosuke's whole thing is his wild animal theme, but he also has a few pretty neat and surprising tricks up his sleeve. As the manga has revealed, one of his stranger talents is his extreme resistance to poison, which presumably has something to do with his incredibly strong constitution. Unfortunately, this one comes with a caveat, because his body also has a similar resistance to medicine. You'll see how that might be a problem at some point down the line.
Of course, it could be that the whole immunity thing is simply yet another manifestation of his characteristic stubbornness, which once again returns to his whole pig-headed theme. Inosuke is pretty much made of resolve, and as such, he's very unlikely to back down from any challenge. If this turns out to be his secret behind his ability to withstand hazardous substances, too, it will be interesting to see what happens to his poison resistance if he mellows out enough at some point down the line.