Inosuke Hashibira is a feral, hot-headed Demon Slayer raised in the mountains by boars, defined by his boar mask, fierce competitiveness, and distinctive “Beast Breathing” style, but covered with the aggressive shell upon learning to work within a team and connect with the human race.
The core that is growing for a well-developed sense of empathy, loyalty, and love, as he evolves from a wild and feral beast into a complex, caring, but wonderfully crazy looking friend.
He’s defined by his primal strength, heightened senses (touch), and impulsiveness, but his journey is one of softening and finding a true identity.
Appearance
Inosuke is an average height and pale complexion young man with a very toned and muscular build for his age. In sharp contrast to this, he has an incredibly pretty and alluring face which made Zenitsu almost believe that he was a girl.
He has large, wide eyes framed with its array of long eyelashes, the iris a dark to soft pale green with black pupils having a small, white dot on the center of the pupils, thin eyebrows and what could be a small, well mannered mouth.
His thick raven black hair grows just passed his shoulders while it tapers off to blue at the tips with an unruly and uneven fringe that falls over on to just above his eyes from where it puffed out just to go ahead and curve down to become thin in his forehead.
Personality
Inosuke is short-tempered, confrontational, abrasive and proud. He always like to think that he is the strongest fighter in a situation and always challenging most people he comes across and wanting other people to respect and praise him for his ability.
This frequently puts him into unwanted danger as he has such a habit of overestimating his own abilities in comparison to who he is fighting and refuses to acknowledge when he’s been defeated, which can be seen when Giyu Tomioka has to tie him up after his fight with Father of the Spider Family in order to keep him from challenging the Hashira to a fight with him while he was still severely injured from his previous battle.
This constant wanting to be the best can also cause Inosuke to be very provocative, for he always tries to goad others, mostly, Tanjiro Kamado, into fighting him, although in the case of the latter he usually fails because of Tanjiro’s oblivious kind nature.
Inosuke has a very vengeful side to his personality, especially if the people he cares about become harmed. He refused to help injured train engineer who stabbed Tanjiro and was convinced that he was right in letting him die only helping him when Tanjiro begged Inosuke to do so and forgave the man.
He was immediately angry toward Doma when he learned he killed and devoured Shinobu, and when he found out that Doma was also the person who orphaned him, Doma by himself challenged the Upper Rank and said he would create hell for him. Additionally, in the final battle against Muzan Kibutsuji, he moved directly up against the Demon King and demanded that he be the one to atone himself by dying for mutilating and almost killing all the other Demon Slayers.
Abilities
Inosuke is a very skilled and talented swordsman; he was able to learn Total Concentration Breathing on his own, develop his very own Breathing Style known as Beast Breathing, based on his own instincts and observations of wild animals, gained the necessary survival skills to live in the mountains, and pass Final Selection to become a Demon Slayer, all without any formal training.
Even for his first appearance, Inosuke is proven to be more than capable of hunting and slaying demons on his own such as when he easily killed the Horned Demon without any trouble whatsoever.
After Rehabilitation Training He was able to confront Lower Rank One Enmu that was given a high dosage of Muzan’s Blood along side his companions and pivotal in his defeat His individual skill drastically improves due to the act of participating in Hashira Training, to the point he was seen to be able to defeat hordes of demons on par with the Lower Ranks in strength within the Infinity Castle, for hours on end.
He has proven on several occasions that he is capable of holding his own and putting up his own contribution in fights against Upper Rank demons of the Twelve Kizuki which was regarded as the equivalent of 5 to 10 years of intensive training, namely the dual Upper Rank Six’s Gyutaro and Daki who have killed and devoured a combined total of 22 Hashira, as well as the far more powerful Upper Rank Two, Doma.
He is also incredibly talented, with an inhuman sense of touch and enhanced flexibility, as well as a natural inclination for fighting and a sharp intuition. As more evidence to his talent, whereas Tanjiro Kamado took more than three weeks to learn Total Concentration: Constant, Inosuke took only 9 days to master the technique and he was also able to learn and master Repetitive Action after seeing Tanjiro using it a single time.
Animal Imitation:
Due to growing up in the wilderness of the mountains, Inosuke saw the wild animals living there and his fighting habits changed to incorporate those of these animals.
As a result, the way he fought and his fighting style both by hand and with a sword are very animalistic and have little to do with the traditional forms of martial arts.
Tanjiro Kamado stated that his unnatural fighting style resembles that of a “four-legged beast” due to the way his attacks come from a very low angle and with the fact that his style is very ferocious and involves other unorthodox movements thus making him very unpredictable and vicious.
Poison Resistance:
Inosuke was able to resist and survive the effect of the poison of Upper Rank Six to a certain extent despite its considered deadliness being on par with a virus, which means that he may have complete immunity to a certain amount of poison.
However as stated by Aoi Kanzaki this also means that none of Shinobu Kocho’s medicines will work on him therefore if he were exposed to a stronger poison than Gyutaro or one to which he has not developed a resistance to they cannot be used as a remedy and he is in greater danger of dying.
