Hump Day Husbandos: Inosuke (Demon Slayer)
Sometimes you want a suave, cultured man to take you by the hand and tell you it is all going to be okay, and sometimes you want someone who is a bit of an animal. Inosuke is definitely the latter, running wild in the Demon Slayer world with a boar’s head and an unsettlingly flexible body. Weird as he might be, he’s certainly one of a kind.
We love the unique and odd around these parts, so it feels like high time we gave Inosuke the Hump Day Husbando treatment. In a world full of demons and monsters, somehow he manages to be one of the most memorable characters.
Who is Inosuke?
As Tanjiro sets out on his quest to return his adorable little sister to her human form, he’s joined by a pair of bumbling idiots. This is his burden as a shounen protagonist, but only one of these idiots is actually unbearable. While Zenitsu is always screaming and crying at the slightest provocation, it falls to Inosuke to lend Tanjiro a helping hand in battle. This is a task that the wild boy is uniquely suited to.
At first, Inosuke appears as monstrous as the demons that the group is sworn to fight. Wearing the head of the boar that raised him over his unsettlingly beautiful face and wielding a pair of serrated swords that look as wicked as they are structurally unsound, he is unabashedly strange. He’s loud and boisterous, yet his strangeness is an asset in almost every situation the group finds themselves in.
Why we love him
The key difference between Zenitsu and Inosuke is that the boar-headed weirdo is always moving the plot forward in a way that his fellow supporting character fails to. Despite his intense desire to prove himself, he can focus when the time counts and, importantly, contribute to the plot in a meaningful way. His weird flexibility isn’t just an excuse for the mangaka to draw Inosuke in the most unsettling way possible; it makes him a difficult, almost impossible foe to fight.
The fact that beneath the boar’s head is the most beautiful young man you’ll find outside of a shoujo romance manga only adds to Inosuke’s appeal. He is completely unaware and unbothered by how pretty he is. Why would any of that actually matter to him anyway? It doesn’t help him fight or make him stronger. As much as I usually hate loud, overbearing characters in anime, Inosuke manages to be just weird enough that I can’t help but love the boy.
Why you’ll love him
Anime fans can’t have missed hearing about Inosuke in the past several years. With Demon Slayer continually one of the biggest shows on the planet and having one of the highest-grossing movies in anime history, it has become one of the most recognisable properties at every convention in the world. Inosuke is one of the core characters in this anime juggernaut and contributes to the story more than anyone aside from Tanjiro himself.
For all his bluster about being the strongest, Inosuke isn’t above sacrificing his body or his life to help his companions win the fight. At the height of the Entertainment District arc, his willingness to take a poisoned sickle to the heart was one of the most dramatic moments in the series to date. Finding the balance between having a gimmick without becoming one note is difficult for any writer and Inosuke is one of the best examples of doing it right.
Season three of Demon Slayer is upon us. If you haven’t caught up yet, you can watch every episode, plus the excellent Mugen Train movie, on Crunchyroll.
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