Nezuko Kamado

Hey little sister, what have you done? Tanjiro's younger sister. After being attacked by a demon whose blood entered her body through an open wound, she became a demon herself. Even after becoming a demon, she protects Tanjiro and other humans. Before she was transformed, she was a gentle girl who loved her family. Set in Taisho-era Japan (aka, "circa World War I"), Demon Slayer is really the story of Tanjiro Kamado trying to cure Nezuko: he only joins the Demon Slayer Corps because if he didn't, they'd have killed her for being infected, and now his goal is to use their resources to find the demon who killed the rest of the family, collecting the demon's blood as a component in a serum to revert Nezuko to full human. Demon Slayer's demons are more like vampires than regular oni: they infect humans with their blood to create more of themselves, they're weak to sunlight, and they need to consume people for sustenance (bodies rather than just drinking blood, but still). That's why one of the defining features of Nezuko as a character design is that she keeps a bamboo bit in her mouth, to help her refrain from snacking on anyone nearby when the urge hits. That's right: it's a toy sold at mass-market stores functionally wearing a ball gag. Nobody tell the parents' groups! The advantage of Demon Slayer's setting is that it's such a time of sociological change that you're free to draw fashion, technology, architecture, anything at all either fairly modern or more old-fashioned, and it will still be "right." It's not like Naruto, where everything seems positively medieval, but then all of a sudden there will be telephone wires and movie cameras just because. Nezuko wears a pink kimono under a brown haori, with a broad red-and-white checked obi sash and dark wraps around her shins. Her primary fighting style involves a lot of strong kicks, so of course she's wearing a loose and flowy dress - the better to draw sexy girl-legs, my dear! As you'd expect from a toy, the skirt portion of the kimono is PVC with some long splits in it to allow for movement, but was there really no way to better integrate those gaps than just cutting them straight in in the most blatant spots? Not cool! Nezuko has a special demon-attack power in the show, because what's a shonen anime without over-the-top special moves? Hers is pretty extreme, though, because it involves setting her own blood on fire! To show that, the figure includes alternate hands molded with large, pink flames jetting out of them. They're molded from translucent plastic, with the hands painted her pale skintone. They're too heavy for the figure to actually pose holding them up - you really need a stand or something to keep them off the ground. Her normal hands are fists, and there's also another pair that has her fingers spread to allow her to attack with her claws. Once a company finds an articulation scheme it likes, it tends to stick with that. No shame in that - if something works well already, only an idiot or scammer would feel the need to reinvent it if they can't make it better. Thus, Nezuko moves the way most modern McFarlane toys move, with joints at the ankles, knees, hips, waist, wrists, elbows, shoulders, neck, and head. It looks like there are thigh swivels, but that's just where her shorts are painted on. Though her hair spills down around her torso (she can no longer put it up by herself, because becoming a demon made her lose most of her memory, and Tanjiro can't put it up for her because he doesn't know how), it's made here from the same soft PVC as her robes, so it can at least flex a little and hopefully not get entirely in the way of any poseability. Looking at the Demon Slayer fan art, it swiftly becomes clear that for an unsettling percentage of the fans, a sizeable part of the appeal of Nezuko Kamado as a character is "subservient, childlike, totally dependent on the audience-surrogate character, and, oh yeah, unable to voice any thoughts or opinions of her own because she's literally wearing a muzzle." You don't need to scratch the surface very hard to find the weird in that one. I swear, you kids today, getting introduced to bondage fantasies by your animoos instead of the way God intended: by seeing the trailer for Boxing Helena in front of some other, saner movie on a VHS tape. She's honestly a much cooler character than that would have you believe, fighting off her new demon instincts through sheer force of will, and becoming the first demon to ever become an official Demon Slayer. Absolutely no surprise that while McToys put her in Series 1, she was the hardest figure to find. -- 08/18/24

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