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YashaHime

YashaHime: Princess Half-Demon, Vols. 1-2

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YashaHime: Princess Half-Demon epitomizes what I dislike most about IP-driven entertainment. It’s a manga adaptation of an anime sequel to a popular series, made with little involvement from the original author. Though the scriptwriters have created new characters and plot lines for the sequel, YashaHime feels more like the product of a focus group than an organic continuation of the story.

Like InuYasha, YashaHime begins in present-day Tokyo, where one of Sesshomaru’s twin daughters is living with the Higurashi clan. There are a few hints that Towa is troubled—she’s bounced from school to school, never really fitting in with her peers—but she valiantly tries to be a normal teenager. The sudden appearance of a demon at the Higurashi’s shrine sets the plot in motion, whisking Towa back to the feudal era and reuniting her with Setsuna, her fraternal twin, and Moroha, her cousin. Once back in her own time period, Towa joins Setsuna and Moroha on a quest to locate a set of “mystical pearls” and solve the mystery of what happened to their families.

There’s real potential in building a sequel around Sesshomaru and InuYasha’s daughters, but the authors skimp on meaningful character development. Setsuna, for example, is stoic and surly like Sesshomaru, while Moroha is boastful and loud like InuYasha; only Towa feels like a fully realized character. Towa is depicted as a shojo prince, decked out in a white pants suit and cropped haircut that lend her an aura of gender-bending cool—a point reinforced in the early chapters of volume one, when Towa is showered with notes from adoring female classmates. Beneath her cool exterior, however, Towa is haunted by the gaps in her memory, as she struggles to fit in with her adoptive family.

The other big drawback to YashaHime is that the authors lack Rumiko Takahashi’s gift for imaginative, economical storytelling. They shamelessly mine the original series for ideas, staging several action sequences that recall the earliest chapters of InuYasha. (Remember the three-eyed crows? Or the centipede demon who kidnapped Kagome? They’re back for another turn in the spotlight.) In between the demon-wrangling and the unfunny sight gags, the authors fall back on long-winded conversations to reveal how the three girls were separated from their parents, over-explaining everything to such a degree that the story groans under the weight of expository dialogue.

About the best I can say for YashaHime is that Takashi Shiina has done an admirable job of capturing the charm of InuYasha‘s character designs while making them look a little more up-to-date. Though Shiina’s linework is more angular than Rumiko Takahashi’s, the characters strongly resemble Takahashi’s original creations. All three leads have features that recall their famous fathers—Setsuna’s fluff is a particularly nice touch—while the human characters from InuYasha have aged in a naturalistic fashion. The demons, too, are drawn with care; Myoga, Jaken, and Kirara are all immediately recognizable.

I wish I enjoyed this series more, as I’ve been an InuYasha fan for almost twenty years. Part of the reason I loved the original series was that it felt like a real work of imagination, with odd flourishes of horror and genuine moments of pathos. YashaHime, by contrast, is so beholden to Takahashi’s original text that it never takes the kind of creative risks that would elevate it beyond the level of corporate doujinshi. There’s nothing as deeply unsettling as the sight of Naraku’s flesh bubbling in a cauldron, or as poignant as Kikyo and InuYasha’s final conversation; everything has a warmed-over quality, even when Shiina and Katsuyuki Sumisawa’s script explores new ground. Not recommended.

YASHAHIME: PRINCESS HALF-DEMON, VOLS. 1-2 • STORY AND ART BY TAKASHI SHIINA, MAIN CHARACTER DESIGN BY RUMIKO TAKAHASHI, SCRIPT COOPERATION BY KATSUYUKI SUMISAWA • TRANSLATED BY JUNKO GODA • ADAPTED BY SHAENON K. GARRITY • LETTERING BY JAMES GAUBATZ • VIZ MEDIA • 200 pp. • RATED TEEN (Fantasy violence, horror)

A First Look at YashaHime: Demon Half-Princess

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For a brief moment in the early 2000s, Rumiko Takashashi’s InuYasha was the shonen franchise in America. It was a constant presence on cable television, where it anchored Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim line-up, and a commercial success for VIZ Media, which issued and re-issued the series in formats ranging from flipped floppies to deluxe, three-in-volumes. By the time InuYasha finished its run in 2008, readers had moved on to other franchises, but InuYasha was an important series for the North American comics market, as it helped reveal an underserved population of teens who weren’t particularly interested in Batman or Captain America, but were interested in reading comics about characters their own age.

InuYasha also demonstrated that teen girls were just as enthusiastic about action, adventure, and horror comics as their male counterparts, especially if the series featured well-rounded female characters. To be sure, plenty of shonen manga included at least one Tough Female Character™, but InuYasha’s three female leads were defined as much by their frustrations, insecurities, and smarts as they were their ass-kicking capabilities. Equally important, Kagome, Sango, and Kikyo weren’t drawn for the male gaze; they were depicted as normal young women, making it easier for teen girls to identify with the characters’ struggles and triumphs.

It seems fitting, then, that the new InuYasha spin-off puts girls front and center. YashaHime: Princess Half-Demon is a “next generation” sequel that focuses on the original characters’ offspring—in this case, the teenage daughters of InuYasha and his big brother Sesshomaru. This time around, however, Sesshomaru’s twins Towa and Setsuna are the leads and InuYasha’s kid Moroha is the brash, impetuous foil to her sterner, more reticent cousins.

The good news is that YashaHime faithfully adheres to the spirit of the original series, with its characteristic mixture of romance, slapstick, horror, and action; anyone worried that the new series might try too hard to differentiate itself from InuYasha will be happy to see that the new show keeps the focus on demon-fighting, quests, and camaraderie. The bad news is that the first episode is so compressed that the new heroines barely make an impression on the viewer, as their introductions are overshadowed by clumsy bits of exposition, cameo appearances by the original series’ main characters, and a showdown between a demon and the old gang.

In an effort to create more continuity between the original series and the sequel, the second episode reveals that Towa was raised by Kagome’s younger brother Sota in present-day Tokyo. Towa’s introductory scenes are so focused on explaining her backstory that her distinctive choice of clothing—a schoolboy’s uniform—initially seems like an afterthought: “better for fighting,” Towa tells us in a voice-over. That detail turns out to be an important clue about how Towa sees herself, as she complains that “girls must be feminine and boys must be masculine,” a distinction that Towa finds as restrictive as the clothes she’s expected to wear. Towa’s gender presentation is addressed in a ham-fisted way—her younger sister pleads with Towa to be more “girly” and “cute”—but the writers’ willingness to address Towa’s fierce rejection of gender binaries suggests that YashaHime may explore some interesting new thematic territory.

The only truly disappointing aspect of YashaHime is the animation, a flaw that’s most evident in its stiffly executed fight scenes. The animators never create a persuasive illusion of people jumping, flying, and running through three-dimensional space; all the characters look like paper cut-outs superimposed on unimaginative backgrounds. The flatness of the imagery is even more obvious when YashaHime and InuYasha are viewed side-by-side, as InuYasha’s softer, more nuanced color palette gave the picture plane more depth and the characters’ bodies more weight. The one bright spot is YashaHime‘s character designs: Moroha, Towa, and Setsuna bear just enough resemblance to their parents to make it easy for the viewer to grasp the father-daughter connection, even though each girl has her own unique look. That attention to detail extends beyond their physical appearance, too, influencing the way they move, talk, and twitch their noses when they catch wind of a demon.

If I sound a little ambivalent about YashaHime, I am: it shows considerable promise, but hasn’t quite escaped the long shadow of its parent series or found the right pacing for the kind of stories it wants to tell. I’m reserving final judgment until the relationships between Towa, Setsuna, and Moroha are more clearly delineated—after all, it was the complex web of feelings and friendships that made InuYasha compelling as much as its demon-of-the-week adventures. Here’s hoping the sequel will embrace that approach, too.

Episodes 1-2 of YashaHime: Princess Half-Demon are currently streaming on Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Hulu. New episodes air on Saturdays.