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kizamisoh this shipping woes. it never ends. this is tangential to my last post actually, but i think it was long enough as is. SOOOOO.
i said it'd be fine to ship shadria if you aged her up, or if she had lived and could canonically age. however there is one series i wish this didn't apply to.
sighs.
let's talk about hanyou no yashahime, the anime only sequel to inuyasha, and how this one series not only managed to ruin a character i spent half a decade in love with, but divided the fandom in ways i didn't think were possible. i watched other sesshoumaru fans in real time, fans that had TATTOOS of him, suffer in agony with me over what this series did to him. it was as like brian griffin died and the people got tattoos to mourn him and then he came back to life 2 episodes later nullifying any sympathy you were supposed to have for his death. except people already had the tattoos and now felt like their skin had been vandalised.
THIS IS GONNA BE A LONG ONE. STRAP IN.
first, a little backstory.
the inuyasha manga ended in 2008. the original 2000 anime ended in 2004. the initial sequel series, inuyasha: kanketsu-hen (the final act) starting airing in 2010 to finish wrapping up where the original anime left off (which was a gigantic fucking cliffhanger, of course). it was a bit of a disaster as they had about 300 chapters to cover in 26 episodes so a lot of arcs were blended together (i think a little bit of it was done okay, but generally...) it was rushed as hell. whatever though. we got our ending.
there is a ship in this series that divides the fandom a bit. the ship known as sessrin (sesshoumaru/rin). a pairing between inuyasha's older full demon half-brother and a 7-8 year old girl (she has no canon age but it used to be agreed upon that she was at least 7. some people say 8. to cope with the weirdness of yashahime, they say 9-10. whatever). for reference, the only inuyasha characters with canon ages are kohaku (11) and kagome.(15) as stated in the original manga. eventually season 2 of yashahime confirmed rin was 18 when she got with sesshoumaru which felt like a cope-ass reaction to the discourse. lmfao. but generally, no character has an actual canon age. also as an aside, me and NORMAL FANS preferred kohaku/rin as a ship. it's very obvious that rumiko takahashi liked the two as well since rin was so willing to forgive kohaku for trying to kill her (he was under a spell but she didn't know that) and she actively kept seeking him out to be around him. he also eventually joins sesshoumaru's group and travels with them a bit.
and i... always preferred the ship between kagura and sesshoumaru (sesskagu, to differentiate between sesskag, the ship between him and kagome). it was obvious there that takahashi wanted something like that to happen. not like sesshoumaru falling in love with her or anything, but that her death opened more of his cold little bitch heart.
backstory on sesshoumaru:
he initially hated humans. he hated inuyasha for being half-human. he was, in this world, a racist little shit. somewhere along the lines (literally his 3rd appearance in the series), he gets BTFO'D by inuyasha is half-dead. he has a sword that can heal instead of hurt, the tenseiga. it can also resurrect life and with a pure enough heart, it can resurrect 100 dead souls. his beef with inuyasha is that he hates this sword because he's a heartless faggot and feels owed inuyasha's sword, the tessaiga (you'll see this spelt as "tetsusaiga" a lot, that's a misspelling due to misreading of a furigana character on behalf of the VIZ translators but it's stuck, so that's the spelling they use, the rest of us weebs use tessaiga as it's meant to be spelled), which was willed to him by their late father. the tessaiga can kill 100 demons in one fell swoop. it also can't work unless it's purpose is to protect. humans can wield it easily. demons cannot. sesshoumaru cannot even touch the sword without using corpse hands or something, since inuyasha cuts off his left arm so he's resorted to various types of new arms. human ones, dragons ones. all died and useless. anyways, after he get's almost killed, the tenseiga shields from tessaiga's blast and protects him from dying. he ends up in a forest miles away and there he meets rin.
she's initially mute due to trauma of watching her family get brutally slaughtered by brigands which orphans her. she lives alone in a shitty little hovel. she tries to help sesshoumaru and give him food and water. sesshoumaru acts like a bitch about it because he doesn't want help from some random child, let alone a human one. rin is beat by the villagers for stealing fish from the river which is for everyone. they take mild pity on her. just not enough to not beat the shit out of her for wronging them. she meets sesshoumaru again and offers him food. he declines. she is sad. curiously, he asks about the bruises on her face. even she is stunned because no one's ever shown any empathy for her before. she smiles at him. he's utterly confused and says "why are you smiling? i'm just curious, i don't really care." (very shadow coded. he's so very shadow coded). she skips happily back to her shitty village where everyone is being slaughtered by wolves. (in a side plot, after inuyasha and co are done battling sesshoumaru, they happen upon villages that have been ravaged by wolf demons and this where kouga comes in. he's not important to this character dissection but it's to provide context for what happens next). rin begins to run.
sesshoumaru is able to pick himself up again and his little troll companion jaken happens upon him. jaken is a kappa demon that is very gay and loyal to sesshoumaru. he's extremely actually gay for him, it's so funny. anyways, sesshoumaru smells blood. he happens upon rin's corpse. she's been killed by the wolves. sesshoumaru does something extremely out of character and uses the tenseiga to resurrect her as a "test" to see what would happen. rin's heart beats. to his shock, the little girl is alive. from then on, she joins along with sesshoumaru and jaken as part of their duo and they become a trio. when we meet them again later on, she's even regained the ability to speak again and have fun! she even has a new kimono *this is important to note later. in the manga, sesshoumaru seems mildly annoyed by rin at some points. he's direct and tells her to shut up. in the anime, he's a little... nicer to her. and here's where some differences begin.
there are a few anime-only filler episodes dedicated to the relationship between sesshoumaru and his connection to rin. the anime likes to add flavour where the manga doesn't have any in regards to their relationship. this is because, just like with kikyou and inuyasha, the anime staff has a personal bias and likes the ship between the two.
(the inukik thing is a whole other can of worms. i've made many tumblr posts about it. the anime staff prefers inukik over inukag and go out of their way to make kagome unlikable in the anime and inuyasha unkind to her in some baffling ass moments which is all the result of voice actor nepotism. i'll make another post about it maybe).
personally, i think the rin-centric episodes are kinda cute. especially episode 162, oh my god man. it makes me die inside sometimes (it also wasn't written by sumisawa, the main series director, so i can sleep easy as he will be the main villain here KEK).
along sesshoumaru's journey with his group, he makes a few interactions with kagura. a villain to inuyasha's group but she develops in infatuation with sesshoumaru and believes he's the strongest and the key to freeing her from her shackles to the main series villain, naraku. as he literally holds her heart in his hands so she isn't allowed to do much. rin herself is extremely aware of kagura's feelings and is a approves of her wanting sesshoumaru (both in the manga and anime which is funny as kagura kidnaps her at one point. rin is very forgiving for a young child).
here's where the divide happens. some of us like sesskagu, and some fans like sessrin.
i'm not so delusional to think sesshoumaru would ever fall in love with kagura, but to say he didn't have some care/pity for her is incorrect, for you see...
towards the middle end of the series, kagura is given her heart back, but with a caveat. it's injected with poisonous miasma and it's slowly killing her. because naraku is a bastard and wasn't gonna give her that freedom from him so easily. her one wish is to sesshoumaru one last time. and does she ever.
he tries to use tenseiga to save her, but he is unable to. she dies happily though. at this point inuyasha's group knew kagura wanted to be free from naraku and had saved kohaku many times. inuyasha wanted her to join their group, but she declines as it wouldn't be right for her after everything that's happened between them. so inuyasha asks if she suffered. sesshoumaru says "she was smiling".
this is the end for kagura, but not sesshoumaru's heart opening more. after this happens, sesshoumaru learns his sword can now be used as a true weapon to, not really cut, but open a portal to cast demons straight into hell itself. sesshoumaru thinks about kagura when it's remarked that his heart has changed a lot for his sword to be this strong now.
kohaku is uncomfortable being in inuyasha's group and tags along with sesshoumaru after this. he is sango's brother and they have a complicated history. she's sad to see him go but as long as he's alive he's fine. kohaku's predicament is interesting because he was killed after he gets possessed and kills he and sango's entire family and wounds sango greatly. (they're both on the left of that last image). kohaku is brought back to life with a jewel shard and if it's removed, he will die, so sesshoumaru's sword can't save him either.
some time after this, sesshoumaru's mother comes along (OHHHHHH I CAN'T BEGIN TO DESCRIBE HOW WE ALL FELT FINALLY MEETING HER CANONICALLY AFTER ALL THIS TIME. THE WOMAN THAT BIRTHED HIM. WHAT'S SHE LIKE? well...) she's a total sarcastic bitch. i love her. she wants to test sesshoumaru one last time, as another wish from his late father to make his sword even stronger. why she bothered to keep a promise to a man that most likely cheated on her with a human is anyone's guess. i think she just likes drama and chaos. so she casts his group into hell. after some time, kohaku remarks rin isn't breathing. sesshoumaru, for the first time, shows some genuine shock on his face. soon rin is captured by a hellhound and dragged further into the depths of hell. sesshoumaru saves her, but it shocked by something. she's dead. again. he tries to resurrect her with the tenseiga. he's unable to. for the first time in his life, he is brought to tears and despair over letting her die. lamenting he never should have let her follow him. he defeats the hellhound, saves all the souls in hell with his sword, and comes back out.
sesshoumaru's mother tells him once someone has already been resurrected with the tenseiga once, it cannot be used again on that same person. if they are alive by other means, it can't save them either (so kohaku's and kagura's cases). sesshoumaru is distraught. his mother is shocked he cares so much about such a human whelp. she uses her necklace to call her soul back from the afterlife and grants her life once more. sesshoumaru is unable to show happiness on his face so jaken cries in happiness for him because he's an #empath..
so.
you can probably tell from this why people are diehard for this ship. hell, they were even BEFORE these chapters dropped but this cemented this ship as something never fucking going away.
spoilers, but who gives a shit, this whole thing is spoilers, in the final chapter of the manga rin is living in a human village now with kaede (kikyou's sister) so she can rehabilitate into living with humans again. remember when i mentioned the kimonos earlier? sesshoumaru drops by to give her new kimonos as presents frequently. this didn't help... but i still don't see it as romance. rumiko takahashi probably didn't either.
alright so what happened?
well. it's 2020 now. it had been 12 years since the manga ended and about 10 years since kanketsu-hen ended. where do we go from here? well. a new anime of course! it was announced as being focused on sesshoumaru and inuyasha's daughters. moroha, inuyasha and kagome's daughter. and touwa and setsuna, sesshoumaru's daughters. we were excited. but there was an issue. a mystery...
who the hell is the mother of sesshoumaru's kids? this was left a secret all the way into the broadcast even. you could say the character designs left hints but... not really.
from left to right, we have setsuna, touwa, and moroha. some backstory, rumiko takahashi did the basic character design and outline of the story, but it not written by her and even to her and the team and the new mangaka working on the manga adaptation of the anime, it is seen as an alternate reality. a "what-if" scenario. none of them see it as truly canon as to takahashi, the story ended with the original manga. she has said this in her own words. good enough for me! but we can only cope so long.
the series begins in the modern era. for some reason in the past, touwa is separated from setsuna and ends up in kagome's era where she is raised by her younger brother, souta. more spoilers, but kagome remains in the feudal era with inuyasha after they were separated for 3 years in the finale of the original manga. some bullshit happens and touwa is sent into the past where she meets setsuna and moroha. whatever, it's all a buncha weird bullshit. moroha has never met her parents because they got trapped somewhere since she was a baby. bullshit. whatever. same with setsuna and touwa. they don't know their parents for a long while.
anyways bullshit happens we learn whatever. blah. a lot of us are on the edge of the seats weekly waiting for it to be revealed who sesshoumaru's wife is. a lot of are like, omg maybe it's some magic with kagura? because we're delusional. his daughters are obviously half-human.
we get a preview for episode 14.
oh no.
we wait with bated breath for that saturday (hilariously this series and sotsu and gou, the other shitty sequel series to higurashi no naku koro ni, both premiered october 2020. LMFAO).
oh. oh GOD no. it's worse than we could have imagined.
it's rin. his wife is rin.
even worse, he takes their babies and fucks off somewhere and rin never gets to hold them because idk. doom is gonna happen. whatever. rin is then sealed inside the goshinboku tree WHICH IS BULLSHITTTTTTTTTTTTT TO INUKAG. THAT TREE IS SPECIFIC TO THOSE TWO. it is the tree where kikyou seals inuyasha for 50 years (sound familiar...? COUGHS). when kagome is thrust into the past, she meets him there and frees him after he life is in danger. that tree has ALWAYS been the connected to kagome and inuyasha, but because the staff, especially sumisawa, disliked the inukag ship, they made the tree... SESSRIN THEMED INSTEAD? FUCK OFF? also kikyou dies for good in the original series and they bring her back in the form of the tree's spirit just to shoehorn her existence when it's unneeded here. this series is such bullshit lmfao regardless of the sessrin stuff.
this obviously split the fandom so hard it's still left marks to this day. since i was a teen i was always beefing with sessrin fans. i fucking hated when people insinuated my favourite character was a fucking paedophile and this series just... CONFIRMED it. the manga adaptation tried to say he didn't develop feelings for her until she was older. bitch let's do some math. the series takes place in current time, 2020. the original series started in 1996/1997. touwa and setsuna are 14. if rin really was 7 years old, she would have been 14 when she had them. kagome would not have let that shit fly are you serious? she was the first to callout miroku's skeevy ass when he was hitting on girls even younger than that. so fans started coping like, no noooooo rin was 9-10. she was older. then in the second season they had to confirm she got with sesshoumaru when she 18 so uhm actually it's NOT grooming! "UHM AKTLLY IT WAS NORMAL FOR THE TIME!" DON'T CARE!
bro. i don't care how old she was when they got together, bitch, he practically raised her and gave her kimonos as his weird way of showing affection, getting together with her when she's older is textbook fucking grooming. don't piss me off. this shit made the fandom fucking IMPLODE and ofc you had the freaks (oomf being one of them) who are like "Actually it's sexier that she was groomed" because remember, people have shipped sessrin since her introduction to the manga. when i was a teen i didn't mind if they aged her up, but i still hated it. i didn't know what grooming was back then i just know i hated whatever shippers were insinuating. and ofc there were people that shipped them while she was still a kid bcus ofc people like that existing even back then. dude.
fuck. this. shit.
i think what pisses me off the most about this series was sesshoumaru's original ENG VA, david kaye, wasn't involved with kanketsu-hen because he had moved to LA by then and canada had retarded laws about voice actors and country whatever. so he couldn't return as sesshoumaru and he was all our fave VA. i was OBSESSEDDDDDDD with him. so michael dangerfield took over as sesshoumaru in that. he did okay i think. it was alright. but by the time yashahime came out, funimation and VIZ had some contractual agreements now and david kaye returned as sesshoumaru................. GREAT! HE GETS TO RETURN AS THE WORST VERSION OF THE CHARACTER AND NOT THE ONE THAT HAD ALL THE BEST CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. GREAT. REAL GREAT. AMAZING. STOP PISSING ME OFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
also let's talk about the title of this fuckass series. "hanyou no yashahime". hanyou is a word takahashi invented to describe what inuyasha is. a half-demon. though "demon" isn't the right word. he's half-youkai actually. but there is no proper word for "youkai" in english so VIZ translated all versions of "youkai" to mean "Demon", tho a more accurate translation would be "spirit/creature". anyways. okay we got that. yashahime. "yasha" is another word similar to "youkai", it's a specific type of "demon". okay. "hime". hime means princess. how the fuck are they princesses? neither sesshoumaru nor inuyasha are exactly royalty despite how rich sesshoumaru may dress, always in furisode (which is fashion typical to gay men...) takahashi didn't intend that, she just wanted him to dress fancy. lmao. fuckass title. fuckass sequel. it's all shit.
a lot of us immediately dropped the series at episode 14. i wasn't watching this shit. fuck off. and then i had fucking sotsugou over here bastardising the higurashi story it was like i was getting pelted with rocks by my favourite series having shitty ass fucking sequels.
the fandom is doing kinda better now. there's scars. some of us hesitate to talk about sesshoumaru now. we try to ignore what they did to him. sadly for a lot of fans, the damage was done. it always kinda breaks my heart a bit when i see people regard sesshoumaru with ire now. sighs.
i'll always love this series. it's not ruined for me at all. i re-read it and re-watch it constantly, but... i can't deny a bit of the bitter taste in my mouth when i think about sesshoumaru. i wanna draw him. i wanna use icons of him. he's sooooooo similar to shadow it's fucking nuts. but i'm scared, y'know? they utterly destroyed his reputation. thank god there are people that are still unaware this sequel series even exists to begin with LMAO.
when i was a teen i also used to ship sesshoumaru with miroku. like some schoolgirl version of him that was mega-horny. i can't explain that. i just got so attached to that ship fsr. lmao. ftr my sesshoumaru ships are sesskagu, sesskag, and of course... mirosess, LMAOOO. and i thought seeing so much incest between him and inuyasha would be the worst thing ever for the character... (called inucest... ofc). sighs.
anyways. idk. i wish this sequel series never fucking happened. i wish sunrise wasn't such a bored, greedy fucking company and stuck to love live and gundam. leave inuyasha alone. fuck off forever.
some day i wish for an inuyasha remake the way urusei yatsura and ranma have gotten remakes closer to the manga. BOTH done by different studios. i want sunrise away from inuyasha forever. it makes me sad though. some animators that worked on the original are no longer alive. like shouko ikeda who did the BEST episodes and easily had the prettiest arte style (she came from kyoani, the haruhi and lucky star people).
a remake without her would be sad. she was still alive when kanketsu-hen was airing, but she wasn't involved in it. she was a tragic victim to the kyoani arson that happened in 2019. fuck the stupid moid that did that.
sighs.
i want a remake though. one close to the manga. one that doesn't fucking remove the tender scenes between kagome and inuyasha and change kikyou completely to make her more of a "girlboss". i want an unbiased production. i do love the anime, but i can't lie and say it's not a little bitter to watch knowing just how fucked they made everything. mmm. i guess i'll use this to talk about the kikyou thing while i'm at it.
during the original 1980s production of ranma 1/2, noriko hidaka played akane, and kappei yamaguchi played ranma. these are our main ship of the series. for inuyasha, hidaka played kikyou, and yamaguchi returned to be inuyasha. can you see where the nepotism bias is forming? lmao. even during interviews where all three are present (satsuki yukino as kagome), it feels like hidaka and yamaguchi have this chemistry being veterans together afterall. it feels like yukino is left behind a lot in the interviews. sometimes yamaguchi is even curt with her in a way that he isn't with hidaka. it makes me sad. but yukino takes it in stride so they're an otherwise cool trio together. funny as hell too. so the anime staff clearly favoured inukik over inukag and this is also so present in the ps2 game, secret of the cursed mask.
i fucking DESPISE how inuyasha is written in that game. idk if it's the ENG translation or if he's an asshole in JPN too (fuck it he probably is), he's so fucking... rude? to kagome? constantly? it's a fun game but holy shit he's such an annoying asshole? i don't even think it was written by the same staff as the anime despite having the same animators on it. christ.
manga inuyasha would kick anime inuyasha's ass and manga sesshoumaru would kill anime sesshoumaru.
fuck!
i said it'd be fine to ship shadria if you aged her up, or if she had lived and could canonically age. however there is one series i wish this didn't apply to.
sighs.
let's talk about hanyou no yashahime, the anime only sequel to inuyasha, and how this one series not only managed to ruin a character i spent half a decade in love with, but divided the fandom in ways i didn't think were possible. i watched other sesshoumaru fans in real time, fans that had TATTOOS of him, suffer in agony with me over what this series did to him. it was as like brian griffin died and the people got tattoos to mourn him and then he came back to life 2 episodes later nullifying any sympathy you were supposed to have for his death. except people already had the tattoos and now felt like their skin had been vandalised.
THIS IS GONNA BE A LONG ONE. STRAP IN.
first, a little backstory.
the inuyasha manga ended in 2008. the original 2000 anime ended in 2004. the initial sequel series, inuyasha: kanketsu-hen (the final act) starting airing in 2010 to finish wrapping up where the original anime left off (which was a gigantic fucking cliffhanger, of course). it was a bit of a disaster as they had about 300 chapters to cover in 26 episodes so a lot of arcs were blended together (i think a little bit of it was done okay, but generally...) it was rushed as hell. whatever though. we got our ending.
there is a ship in this series that divides the fandom a bit. the ship known as sessrin (sesshoumaru/rin). a pairing between inuyasha's older full demon half-brother and a 7-8 year old girl (she has no canon age but it used to be agreed upon that she was at least 7. some people say 8. to cope with the weirdness of yashahime, they say 9-10. whatever). for reference, the only inuyasha characters with canon ages are kohaku (11) and kagome.(15) as stated in the original manga. eventually season 2 of yashahime confirmed rin was 18 when she got with sesshoumaru which felt like a cope-ass reaction to the discourse. lmfao. but generally, no character has an actual canon age. also as an aside, me and NORMAL FANS preferred kohaku/rin as a ship. it's very obvious that rumiko takahashi liked the two as well since rin was so willing to forgive kohaku for trying to kill her (he was under a spell but she didn't know that) and she actively kept seeking him out to be around him. he also eventually joins sesshoumaru's group and travels with them a bit.
and i... always preferred the ship between kagura and sesshoumaru (sesskagu, to differentiate between sesskag, the ship between him and kagome). it was obvious there that takahashi wanted something like that to happen. not like sesshoumaru falling in love with her or anything, but that her death opened more of his cold little bitch heart.
backstory on sesshoumaru:
he initially hated humans. he hated inuyasha for being half-human. he was, in this world, a racist little shit. somewhere along the lines (literally his 3rd appearance in the series), he gets BTFO'D by inuyasha is half-dead. he has a sword that can heal instead of hurt, the tenseiga. it can also resurrect life and with a pure enough heart, it can resurrect 100 dead souls. his beef with inuyasha is that he hates this sword because he's a heartless faggot and feels owed inuyasha's sword, the tessaiga (you'll see this spelt as "tetsusaiga" a lot, that's a misspelling due to misreading of a furigana character on behalf of the VIZ translators but it's stuck, so that's the spelling they use, the rest of us weebs use tessaiga as it's meant to be spelled), which was willed to him by their late father. the tessaiga can kill 100 demons in one fell swoop. it also can't work unless it's purpose is to protect. humans can wield it easily. demons cannot. sesshoumaru cannot even touch the sword without using corpse hands or something, since inuyasha cuts off his left arm so he's resorted to various types of new arms. human ones, dragons ones. all died and useless. anyways, after he get's almost killed, the tenseiga shields from tessaiga's blast and protects him from dying. he ends up in a forest miles away and there he meets rin.
she's initially mute due to trauma of watching her family get brutally slaughtered by brigands which orphans her. she lives alone in a shitty little hovel. she tries to help sesshoumaru and give him food and water. sesshoumaru acts like a bitch about it because he doesn't want help from some random child, let alone a human one. rin is beat by the villagers for stealing fish from the river which is for everyone. they take mild pity on her. just not enough to not beat the shit out of her for wronging them. she meets sesshoumaru again and offers him food. he declines. she is sad. curiously, he asks about the bruises on her face. even she is stunned because no one's ever shown any empathy for her before. she smiles at him. he's utterly confused and says "why are you smiling? i'm just curious, i don't really care." (very shadow coded. he's so very shadow coded). she skips happily back to her shitty village where everyone is being slaughtered by wolves. (in a side plot, after inuyasha and co are done battling sesshoumaru, they happen upon villages that have been ravaged by wolf demons and this where kouga comes in. he's not important to this character dissection but it's to provide context for what happens next). rin begins to run.
sesshoumaru is able to pick himself up again and his little troll companion jaken happens upon him. jaken is a kappa demon that is very gay and loyal to sesshoumaru. he's extremely actually gay for him, it's so funny. anyways, sesshoumaru smells blood. he happens upon rin's corpse. she's been killed by the wolves. sesshoumaru does something extremely out of character and uses the tenseiga to resurrect her as a "test" to see what would happen. rin's heart beats. to his shock, the little girl is alive. from then on, she joins along with sesshoumaru and jaken as part of their duo and they become a trio. when we meet them again later on, she's even regained the ability to speak again and have fun! she even has a new kimono *this is important to note later. in the manga, sesshoumaru seems mildly annoyed by rin at some points. he's direct and tells her to shut up. in the anime, he's a little... nicer to her. and here's where some differences begin.
there are a few anime-only filler episodes dedicated to the relationship between sesshoumaru and his connection to rin. the anime likes to add flavour where the manga doesn't have any in regards to their relationship. this is because, just like with kikyou and inuyasha, the anime staff has a personal bias and likes the ship between the two.
(the inukik thing is a whole other can of worms. i've made many tumblr posts about it. the anime staff prefers inukik over inukag and go out of their way to make kagome unlikable in the anime and inuyasha unkind to her in some baffling ass moments which is all the result of voice actor nepotism. i'll make another post about it maybe).
personally, i think the rin-centric episodes are kinda cute. especially episode 162, oh my god man. it makes me die inside sometimes (it also wasn't written by sumisawa, the main series director, so i can sleep easy as he will be the main villain here KEK).
along sesshoumaru's journey with his group, he makes a few interactions with kagura. a villain to inuyasha's group but she develops in infatuation with sesshoumaru and believes he's the strongest and the key to freeing her from her shackles to the main series villain, naraku. as he literally holds her heart in his hands so she isn't allowed to do much. rin herself is extremely aware of kagura's feelings and is a approves of her wanting sesshoumaru (both in the manga and anime which is funny as kagura kidnaps her at one point. rin is very forgiving for a young child).
here's where the divide happens. some of us like sesskagu, and some fans like sessrin.
i'm not so delusional to think sesshoumaru would ever fall in love with kagura, but to say he didn't have some care/pity for her is incorrect, for you see...
towards the middle end of the series, kagura is given her heart back, but with a caveat. it's injected with poisonous miasma and it's slowly killing her. because naraku is a bastard and wasn't gonna give her that freedom from him so easily. her one wish is to sesshoumaru one last time. and does she ever.
he tries to use tenseiga to save her, but he is unable to. she dies happily though. at this point inuyasha's group knew kagura wanted to be free from naraku and had saved kohaku many times. inuyasha wanted her to join their group, but she declines as it wouldn't be right for her after everything that's happened between them. so inuyasha asks if she suffered. sesshoumaru says "she was smiling".
this is the end for kagura, but not sesshoumaru's heart opening more. after this happens, sesshoumaru learns his sword can now be used as a true weapon to, not really cut, but open a portal to cast demons straight into hell itself. sesshoumaru thinks about kagura when it's remarked that his heart has changed a lot for his sword to be this strong now.
kohaku is uncomfortable being in inuyasha's group and tags along with sesshoumaru after this. he is sango's brother and they have a complicated history. she's sad to see him go but as long as he's alive he's fine. kohaku's predicament is interesting because he was killed after he gets possessed and kills he and sango's entire family and wounds sango greatly. (they're both on the left of that last image). kohaku is brought back to life with a jewel shard and if it's removed, he will die, so sesshoumaru's sword can't save him either.
some time after this, sesshoumaru's mother comes along (OHHHHHH I CAN'T BEGIN TO DESCRIBE HOW WE ALL FELT FINALLY MEETING HER CANONICALLY AFTER ALL THIS TIME. THE WOMAN THAT BIRTHED HIM. WHAT'S SHE LIKE? well...) she's a total sarcastic bitch. i love her. she wants to test sesshoumaru one last time, as another wish from his late father to make his sword even stronger. why she bothered to keep a promise to a man that most likely cheated on her with a human is anyone's guess. i think she just likes drama and chaos. so she casts his group into hell. after some time, kohaku remarks rin isn't breathing. sesshoumaru, for the first time, shows some genuine shock on his face. soon rin is captured by a hellhound and dragged further into the depths of hell. sesshoumaru saves her, but it shocked by something. she's dead. again. he tries to resurrect her with the tenseiga. he's unable to. for the first time in his life, he is brought to tears and despair over letting her die. lamenting he never should have let her follow him. he defeats the hellhound, saves all the souls in hell with his sword, and comes back out.
sesshoumaru's mother tells him once someone has already been resurrected with the tenseiga once, it cannot be used again on that same person. if they are alive by other means, it can't save them either (so kohaku's and kagura's cases). sesshoumaru is distraught. his mother is shocked he cares so much about such a human whelp. she uses her necklace to call her soul back from the afterlife and grants her life once more. sesshoumaru is unable to show happiness on his face so jaken cries in happiness for him because he's an #empath..
so.
you can probably tell from this why people are diehard for this ship. hell, they were even BEFORE these chapters dropped but this cemented this ship as something never fucking going away.
spoilers, but who gives a shit, this whole thing is spoilers, in the final chapter of the manga rin is living in a human village now with kaede (kikyou's sister) so she can rehabilitate into living with humans again. remember when i mentioned the kimonos earlier? sesshoumaru drops by to give her new kimonos as presents frequently. this didn't help... but i still don't see it as romance. rumiko takahashi probably didn't either.
alright so what happened?
well. it's 2020 now. it had been 12 years since the manga ended and about 10 years since kanketsu-hen ended. where do we go from here? well. a new anime of course! it was announced as being focused on sesshoumaru and inuyasha's daughters. moroha, inuyasha and kagome's daughter. and touwa and setsuna, sesshoumaru's daughters. we were excited. but there was an issue. a mystery...
who the hell is the mother of sesshoumaru's kids? this was left a secret all the way into the broadcast even. you could say the character designs left hints but... not really.
from left to right, we have setsuna, touwa, and moroha. some backstory, rumiko takahashi did the basic character design and outline of the story, but it not written by her and even to her and the team and the new mangaka working on the manga adaptation of the anime, it is seen as an alternate reality. a "what-if" scenario. none of them see it as truly canon as to takahashi, the story ended with the original manga. she has said this in her own words. good enough for me! but we can only cope so long.
the series begins in the modern era. for some reason in the past, touwa is separated from setsuna and ends up in kagome's era where she is raised by her younger brother, souta. more spoilers, but kagome remains in the feudal era with inuyasha after they were separated for 3 years in the finale of the original manga. some bullshit happens and touwa is sent into the past where she meets setsuna and moroha. whatever, it's all a buncha weird bullshit. moroha has never met her parents because they got trapped somewhere since she was a baby. bullshit. whatever. same with setsuna and touwa. they don't know their parents for a long while.
anyways bullshit happens we learn whatever. blah. a lot of us are on the edge of the seats weekly waiting for it to be revealed who sesshoumaru's wife is. a lot of are like, omg maybe it's some magic with kagura? because we're delusional. his daughters are obviously half-human.
we get a preview for episode 14.
oh no.
we wait with bated breath for that saturday (hilariously this series and sotsu and gou, the other shitty sequel series to higurashi no naku koro ni, both premiered october 2020. LMFAO).
oh. oh GOD no. it's worse than we could have imagined.
it's rin. his wife is rin.
even worse, he takes their babies and fucks off somewhere and rin never gets to hold them because idk. doom is gonna happen. whatever. rin is then sealed inside the goshinboku tree WHICH IS BULLSHITTTTTTTTTTTTT TO INUKAG. THAT TREE IS SPECIFIC TO THOSE TWO. it is the tree where kikyou seals inuyasha for 50 years (sound familiar...? COUGHS). when kagome is thrust into the past, she meets him there and frees him after he life is in danger. that tree has ALWAYS been the connected to kagome and inuyasha, but because the staff, especially sumisawa, disliked the inukag ship, they made the tree... SESSRIN THEMED INSTEAD? FUCK OFF? also kikyou dies for good in the original series and they bring her back in the form of the tree's spirit just to shoehorn her existence when it's unneeded here. this series is such bullshit lmfao regardless of the sessrin stuff.
this obviously split the fandom so hard it's still left marks to this day. since i was a teen i was always beefing with sessrin fans. i fucking hated when people insinuated my favourite character was a fucking paedophile and this series just... CONFIRMED it. the manga adaptation tried to say he didn't develop feelings for her until she was older. bitch let's do some math. the series takes place in current time, 2020. the original series started in 1996/1997. touwa and setsuna are 14. if rin really was 7 years old, she would have been 14 when she had them. kagome would not have let that shit fly are you serious? she was the first to callout miroku's skeevy ass when he was hitting on girls even younger than that. so fans started coping like, no noooooo rin was 9-10. she was older. then in the second season they had to confirm she got with sesshoumaru when she 18 so uhm actually it's NOT grooming! "UHM AKTLLY IT WAS NORMAL FOR THE TIME!" DON'T CARE!
bro. i don't care how old she was when they got together, bitch, he practically raised her and gave her kimonos as his weird way of showing affection, getting together with her when she's older is textbook fucking grooming. don't piss me off. this shit made the fandom fucking IMPLODE and ofc you had the freaks (oomf being one of them) who are like "Actually it's sexier that she was groomed" because remember, people have shipped sessrin since her introduction to the manga. when i was a teen i didn't mind if they aged her up, but i still hated it. i didn't know what grooming was back then i just know i hated whatever shippers were insinuating. and ofc there were people that shipped them while she was still a kid bcus ofc people like that existing even back then. dude.
fuck. this. shit.
i think what pisses me off the most about this series was sesshoumaru's original ENG VA, david kaye, wasn't involved with kanketsu-hen because he had moved to LA by then and canada had retarded laws about voice actors and country whatever. so he couldn't return as sesshoumaru and he was all our fave VA. i was OBSESSEDDDDDDD with him. so michael dangerfield took over as sesshoumaru in that. he did okay i think. it was alright. but by the time yashahime came out, funimation and VIZ had some contractual agreements now and david kaye returned as sesshoumaru................. GREAT! HE GETS TO RETURN AS THE WORST VERSION OF THE CHARACTER AND NOT THE ONE THAT HAD ALL THE BEST CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. GREAT. REAL GREAT. AMAZING. STOP PISSING ME OFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
also let's talk about the title of this fuckass series. "hanyou no yashahime". hanyou is a word takahashi invented to describe what inuyasha is. a half-demon. though "demon" isn't the right word. he's half-youkai actually. but there is no proper word for "youkai" in english so VIZ translated all versions of "youkai" to mean "Demon", tho a more accurate translation would be "spirit/creature". anyways. okay we got that. yashahime. "yasha" is another word similar to "youkai", it's a specific type of "demon". okay. "hime". hime means princess. how the fuck are they princesses? neither sesshoumaru nor inuyasha are exactly royalty despite how rich sesshoumaru may dress, always in furisode (which is fashion typical to gay men...) takahashi didn't intend that, she just wanted him to dress fancy. lmao. fuckass title. fuckass sequel. it's all shit.
a lot of us immediately dropped the series at episode 14. i wasn't watching this shit. fuck off. and then i had fucking sotsugou over here bastardising the higurashi story it was like i was getting pelted with rocks by my favourite series having shitty ass fucking sequels.
the fandom is doing kinda better now. there's scars. some of us hesitate to talk about sesshoumaru now. we try to ignore what they did to him. sadly for a lot of fans, the damage was done. it always kinda breaks my heart a bit when i see people regard sesshoumaru with ire now. sighs.
i'll always love this series. it's not ruined for me at all. i re-read it and re-watch it constantly, but... i can't deny a bit of the bitter taste in my mouth when i think about sesshoumaru. i wanna draw him. i wanna use icons of him. he's sooooooo similar to shadow it's fucking nuts. but i'm scared, y'know? they utterly destroyed his reputation. thank god there are people that are still unaware this sequel series even exists to begin with LMAO.
when i was a teen i also used to ship sesshoumaru with miroku. like some schoolgirl version of him that was mega-horny. i can't explain that. i just got so attached to that ship fsr. lmao. ftr my sesshoumaru ships are sesskagu, sesskag, and of course... mirosess, LMAOOO. and i thought seeing so much incest between him and inuyasha would be the worst thing ever for the character... (called inucest... ofc). sighs.
anyways. idk. i wish this sequel series never fucking happened. i wish sunrise wasn't such a bored, greedy fucking company and stuck to love live and gundam. leave inuyasha alone. fuck off forever.
some day i wish for an inuyasha remake the way urusei yatsura and ranma have gotten remakes closer to the manga. BOTH done by different studios. i want sunrise away from inuyasha forever. it makes me sad though. some animators that worked on the original are no longer alive. like shouko ikeda who did the BEST episodes and easily had the prettiest arte style (she came from kyoani, the haruhi and lucky star people).
a remake without her would be sad. she was still alive when kanketsu-hen was airing, but she wasn't involved in it. she was a tragic victim to the kyoani arson that happened in 2019. fuck the stupid moid that did that.
sighs.
i want a remake though. one close to the manga. one that doesn't fucking remove the tender scenes between kagome and inuyasha and change kikyou completely to make her more of a "girlboss". i want an unbiased production. i do love the anime, but i can't lie and say it's not a little bitter to watch knowing just how fucked they made everything. mmm. i guess i'll use this to talk about the kikyou thing while i'm at it.
during the original 1980s production of ranma 1/2, noriko hidaka played akane, and kappei yamaguchi played ranma. these are our main ship of the series. for inuyasha, hidaka played kikyou, and yamaguchi returned to be inuyasha. can you see where the nepotism bias is forming? lmao. even during interviews where all three are present (satsuki yukino as kagome), it feels like hidaka and yamaguchi have this chemistry being veterans together afterall. it feels like yukino is left behind a lot in the interviews. sometimes yamaguchi is even curt with her in a way that he isn't with hidaka. it makes me sad. but yukino takes it in stride so they're an otherwise cool trio together. funny as hell too. so the anime staff clearly favoured inukik over inukag and this is also so present in the ps2 game, secret of the cursed mask.
i fucking DESPISE how inuyasha is written in that game. idk if it's the ENG translation or if he's an asshole in JPN too (fuck it he probably is), he's so fucking... rude? to kagome? constantly? it's a fun game but holy shit he's such an annoying asshole? i don't even think it was written by the same staff as the anime despite having the same animators on it. christ.
manga inuyasha would kick anime inuyasha's ass and manga sesshoumaru would kill anime sesshoumaru.
fuck!
