The Insect Hashira's Power
‼️THIS BLOG POST CONTAINS MANGA SPOILERS‼️
Does this really make her weak? What does it mean to be strong?
Does one's physical prowess make up the entirety of a person's strength?
The answer is obvious, and Kocho Shinobu proves it.
This is Shinobu's anger, raw and unfiltered. Even when we first meet her with a smile on her face and a gentle presence, she has always been this way. This behavior is fueled by the demons who have killed her family and torn many other families apart. Ever since the death of her sister, Kanae, she's been determined to spread the same kindness as her, but she doesn't always show it in the most traditional ways towards the demons she kills. She often smiles and laughs while making passive aggressive statements about the demons and their actions. We first learn about the anger she secretly harbors when Tanjiro figures her out through his keen sense of smell in chapter 50.
We have little material to work with when it comes to her combat abilities at the start of the series until we get to the Infinity Castle film, when she battles against the Upper Moon 2 demon.
Physical power does not define a person's overall strength.
Confronting the demon who killed her sister had her overwhelmed with anger, especially as she witnessed him chowing down on the limbs of a woman he had slaughtered. Here, we see she possesses the mental willpower to continue taking him on so she can avenge her sister and get closer to defeating Muzan Kibutsuji with her comrades.
The new forms of her breathing techniques we see in this battle are loaded with symbolism. Each insect illustrated in each attack are known to be conventionally ugly and unsettling to the average person, but they are known to symbolize elements such as courage, strength, overcoming the impossible, and facing one's fears in Japanese culture.
One thing that gives her an advantage over her opponents is her speed. She's able to catch her enemies off their guard and inject them with a large amount of poison with how fast she moves. This was how she was able to land a blow to Douma's eye without giving him time to stop it at the start of their battle.
Her intelligence also gives her an advantage. Going into this battle, Shinobu had two ways to defeat him.
Plan A: Kill him with multiple strikes with even higher doses of numerous mixtures of poison. We see her mixing poison each time she sheathes her sword and unsheathes it again by swinging it around gracefully.
Plan B: If she were to die by his hand, the poison circulating through every cell of her body would make it to his own cells and end his life.
Yes, she planned for the possibility of her death in advance. She worked with Tamayo to create poisons that would be able to take up every part of her body internally, then was taking doses of it for over a year. By the time Douma had absorbed her, she had consumed around 37 kilograms of wisteria poison.
As stated earlier, physical power doesn't define what makes a person strong, but that doesn't mean Shinobu lacks all physical strength.
After breathing in Douma's blood demon art, having her collarbone, ribs, and lungs slashed, bleeding out and on the brink of death, she was able to stand back up and launch one last attack on him.
While Shinobu isn't as strong as the other Hashira in the Demon Slayer Corps, she is far from weak. She deserves a lot of credit for aiding in taking down Douma along with many other demons while she was alive. She's a Hashira for a reason, after all.
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