That's right! We're doing anime and manga monsters! And I'm not gonna bother with an intro paragraph to the whole franchise every single time because I'm tired of getting stuck on those! If you don't know what Inuyasha is this will answer all your questions but you don't really NEED to know to appreciate what's popularly dubbed as MISTRESS CENTIPEDE. Isn't she ADORABLE?! She's in the very first episode! I remember watching the dub of this on Adult Swim, which was like us millenial's most formal introduction to anime together with Toonami, at least if you weren't one of the millenials who had already been watching sci-fi channel's overlooked, early morning "Japanimation" blocks.

   Mistress Centipede is a fairly straightforward Centipede Woman monster design, a naked lady torso on the end of a Chilopod, but it's a mighty long Chilopod. We rarely ever see where her winding coils end, or maybe we never do at all? I don't even remember. More of her to love I guess! Her unblinking stare gives a real mannequin-like impression, as does the fact that she's missing one of her six humanoid arms. I always liked that particular detail. No attention is brought to it and it's never "relevant" that I can recall, whereas normally a one-shot character with a single notably missing appendage typically ends up explaining it later, possibly as part of a revenge motive. Here, it's just a little extra visual flair that says this 'pede has been through some things!

That "mannequin" look kind of plays in later, since the humanlike qualities of her anterior seem to be mostly facade. She bursts out of the "skin" when she gets pissed off enough, revealing an even cuter face with big red eyeballs, no nose, and a big lipless fangly mouth. You know, the kind of mouth Marvel's Venom has, complete with a big long tongue! In this form her skin is also grey-blue, mottled pink, kind of corpsey?

There's a lot of spider yokai in Inuyasha, but only this one has such a cool anatomy! He's a humanoid with a lot of spider-adjacent features, like big eyes and tusk-like fangs, but his EXTREMELY long, many-jointed limbs are joined by strands of flesh that give his silhouette the appearance of a spider's web. Awesome! Why isn't that more common?! A web-shaped spider-monster seems like a no-brainer?!

   If you watch a lot of Japanese media or you're a nerd for folklore, you've probably heard the idea of the "poisonous insect jar," that if you put a bunch of the most venomous creatures in the same jar you'll have an ultra-toxic one come back out when they've all eaten eachother, or something like that. This weird little guy's whole gimmick is wielding a big clay jar of mind-controlling parasitic "worms" (or maybe they're referred to as mushi in the original dialog? I can't remember this either, sorry guys!) as an assassination weapon. The "worms" take all different forms, some with eyeballs for heads, some with ghoulish monster faces, but they all start out as microscopic floating eggs!

  The yokai himself is harder to describe, I think he's meant to give a subtly insectoid impression with his cleft bill-like muzzle and big orange reptile eyes, but he reminds me more of some kind of little lemur man, or an obscure marsupial. It works, from a design perspective, that he's so innocuous compared to his pets.

The main antagonist of Inuyasha is a spooky guy named Naraku, half human and half demon, who can create various "incarnations" from his own body. Two such incarnations are a pair of young brothers, only one of which looks human. The other, Kageromaru, has a human head on a white, tapering body with mantis-like blade arms, lives parasitically inside the more human brother, and likes eating other people's internal organs from the inside. Pretty neat.

I'm a big fan of monsters that are basically "rejected" or "defective" creations. The hair monster came from a tiny, discarded piece of Naraku, growing into an absolutely massive clump of writhing black hair with a drooling, sharp-toothed human mouth in the middle. It is, of course, bitter and angry about being abandoned, but sadly too full of bitterness and malice to have realized this should have made the protagonists its friends. They all should have been nice

This one has exactly the same problem as the hair one. A poor orphaned glob of the bad guy, who inexplicably resents its own endearing form. A big purple ball with one huge central eye encircled by smaller eyes, and lots of long flowing black hair sprouting from the back. So, actually just the hair monster with a bunch of eyes instead of a mouth, so why is this one "eye monster" and the other one not "mouth monster?!" They both have literally the same amount of hair, and use it the same way!

A beautifully nondescript arthropod, not exactly resembling any one kind of insect, larval or otherwise. Her body is snakelike, covered in armor plates, while her huge head is roughly like a human's with lots of messy black hair, but she has little bulging orange eyeballs, six spindly insectoid limbs sprouting off the sides of her face, and her mouth is just a cluster of short, pinkish tongue-like papillae. She also lays eggs that hatch into the most adorable little grubs, with the same eyeballs and the same mouth-tendrils! We never learn anything about what she is or where she came from, sadly, and in the anime she doesn't even talk!

I'm going to make up on the spot here that maybe she's a yokai representing the anger of insect larvae that died before they could metamorphose.

It's uncertain what exactly this entity is either, but it's definitely the most otherworldly supernatural lifeform in the series; a yokai with the form of a living cave, or perhaps even the entire surrounding mountain, with a flesh-lined central stomach and a globular, one-eyed, many-tentacled heart! It apparently only feeds on the spiritual energy of priestesses, wielding lifelike illusions to lure them inside and guide them to its center. Not everything in there is a mirage, though!

A horde of seemingly very tangible giant insects also live within the predatory cavern, and are seen attacking would-be prey well before they reach the stomach, so maybe these are unwelcome opportunists, rather than agents or mutualistic symbiotes of the larger yokai? I adore their designs of course; fat black and blue flies (albeit four-winged, so not Diptera) with round red eyes and sharp, beaklike faces, the whole head shaped kind of like a chitinous blue plague mask or bird skull! Six hairy feelers projecting from either side of the beak add one last touch that doesn't align with any real insect anatomy, but it's still neat!

The second most ghoulish yokai in the entire series initially appears as a giant head made of pale mucus, resembling the face of a goddess, Kannon. But Kannon is a GOOD deity! She wouldn't go around terrorizing humans as a giant slimy head or otherwise! As revealed over the course of this two-part episode, the head is just a puppet of a giant salamander yokai, who was sealed in the temple centuries ago by a monk. The salamander's skin was used to create a portrait of Kannon, which was intended to keep the monster imprisoned forever, but she was awakened again by the growing power and influence of Naraku.

Once she was capable of manifesting a form, the Salamander began force-feeding her eggs to local women, as one does, gestating baby salamander yokai in their stomachs that allowed her to control their minds. THEN she used the zombified women to lure and murder men, as one does, so she could skin them and use that to rebuild her *own* skin. SICK, in both senses of the term!

Maybe the salamander is a little nastier overall, but the Noh Mask, featured in a much earlier episode, is definitely one of the more visceral antagonists. It appears to just be a pale wooden mask of a woman's face, but it craves FLESH - hideously moaning and shrieking for it! - to build itself more of a body, and can even split down the middle into a many-fanged mouth! All this process generates is an ever-growing putty-like mass, which was perhaps envisioned as red gore by Rumiko Takahashi in her original manga, but depicted as a tarry black-brown sludge in the anime, which is actually a lot worse, like it's all instantly necrotic.

We've seen the grisliest, but this one is widely considered the *spookiest.* Tatarimokke is an actual folkloric yokai said to be the ghost of a deceased infant, possessing the form of an owl. Here, it resembles a huge, bright yellow tadpole-like creature with a feather-covered tail, massive eyes and two stunted little arms, overall like a coiled up embryo. Always holding a flute, this "soul piper" guides the spirits of children to the appropriate afterlife, but it's said that it can open up a gate to hell when it opens it eyes completely.

The episode focuses on the ghost of one particular little girl who mistakenly believes that her mother has forgotten her. The Tatarimokke doesn't interfere, or even directly reach out to her, but quietly follows along like an impartial observer, eyes sleepily near-shut...until the girl concludes that she should murder her new baby brother.

Things turn out right in the end, of course, Inuyasha isn't going to show us a sad little kid dragged to an eternity of torture (that's reserved for most episodes of the anime Hell Girl), but out of the entire series, there might be no visual quite so haunting as when this serene puffball looms like a full moon behind the hurt, confused soul of a dead child, and the moment that child resolves to do the truly unthinkable...the spirit makes no other sound or movement as its uncanny gaze just slowly, calmly widens, and widens.

These are first seen serving Kikyo, a priestess who once sealed Inuyasha, comes back from the dead and is kind of a frenemy at first, but they seem to also be kind of their own thing, a creature that exists to ferry lost souls to the next world. They also have a COOL as heck design, resembling luminous fish with pointed, beaky faces, narrow red eyes, two veiny wing-like fins, extremely long eel-like bodies and three pairs of finger-like legs that they use to cradle a single hitodama (wispy fireball soul, if you're brand new to anime and/or to yokai).

Yeah, I'm gonna end on this guy, who is widely hated by the fandom for being an only barely-necessary mascot-sidekick to Inuyasha, ostensibly just kind of a gag character, and a little creepy about young women. He is, however, also a yokai take on one of my favorite insects, and surprisingly enough I do actually like his design. Inuyasha, if you didn't already know this I guess, is a dog yokai, so naturally there's a lineage of flea yokai sworn to serve his bloodline. Or something like that. It's clever!

Myoga only takes the form of what mostly resembles a tiny, squat little old man with a really big round head and huge cartoony eyes, but he does have an adorable little drill-like proboscis instead of any mouth or nose, and a mustache like a couple of spiky palps. I've seen a lot of cartoon fleas, I'm very picky about them, and I'd normally dismiss one that had such a human appearance, but an off-human look is traditional to so many animal yokai, I don't doubt this is what a flea yokai really could have looked like had there ever been a flea yokai in a classical yokai scroll, which I can at least accept and respect more easily than the dozens of cartoon fleas who incorrectly have wings, antennae or mandibles.

Anyway, that's about it for my strongest thoughts on Inuyasha monsters. This series is notorious for just how long the anime dragged on as the characters spent dozens of episodes just wandering around in the woods, hoping to bump in to other characters they kept missing, if I recall correctly. But for a while there, it seemed REALLY fresh. It was maybe one of the first yokai-centric anime to ever air in the United States! Like, wow! That's SUCH a bigger cultural exchange than we ever realized, back then! That's cool!

I have to be honest though: this is almost all I've written for Halloween since the Demon's Crest post! I dawdled around for weeks with just these dozen-some anime guys half-written! Am I taking things TOO easy?? I'll see if I can pick up the pace, because I actually have over a hundred anime and manga creatures already saved to the same site directory, waiting to be commented upon!!! It's gonna be like, animeween this year I guess! Aniween! Halloweanime!?