Volume 22

1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12
13|14|15|16|17|18|19|20|21|22|23|24
25|26|27|28|29|30 Top

The Inuyasha Narrative, Part 22: Tessaiga: The Transforming Fang Sword
	Translation provided by: Robby Stine of Kanabits

Nothing Says the Sengoku Era Like Swords!

The reason Inuyasha wields a sword is that, unlike how things usually go with me, I’d decided it from the beginning. It’d have been a waste to only give him his claws as a weapon. Nothing says the Sengoku era like a sword, so that’s what he got. And I never thought about giving him any other weapons to add to his arsenal. He’d just be weighed down by them. The simplicity of having one sword that changed over time was the right move. When I thought about where he’d get the sword, his father’s bones came to mind. That’s why in all the pictures of his skeleton, I drew him missing one fang. I thought it would make it easy to understand that’s where Tessaiga came from.

Tessaiga, the Sword that Grows Alongside Inuyasha

Tessaiga is an evolving sword. I haven’t read any myself, but I heard these kinds of things exist in foreign science fiction stories. I wonder if they call them evolving weapons, too. I guess they’re in RPGs as well. A sword that gains abilities as it levels up. That’s where the idea came from. It wasn’t my original intention, but somewhere along the way, I decided to have Inuyasha’s sword get stronger along with him. That’s the kind of sword Tessaiga is. It grows along with him.

When I first started doing Inuyasha, I didn’t have any plans for character development. But with the kind of story it is, I realized you kind of have to develop your characters, or the events of the story lose their meaning. I wanted a feeling that the characters gained something from their struggles. In the case of Inuyasha and Tessaiga, the sword didn’t only change shape, it would also get really heavy and stuff like that. That was key. And so, Inuyasha must grow along with his sword. I never had him do any real training, I just had him grow bit by bit as the story went along. They’d always be some adversary, some opponent, that he’d need to get stronger to take down. I even made Tessaiga, Inuyasha’s only memento of his father, break in the midst of battle, and had him use his own fang to fix it. I tried making Tessaiga easy enough to understand just by how it looked. How should I put this? It’s not like he could become a better swordsman just by getting physically stronger, he needed stories that would help him grow! Or something like that. I feel like I was able to do that for him, which I’m happy about.

By the end, Tessaiga had become a sword that gave Inuyasha lots of attack options. I might have overdone it a bit. (laughs)

1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12
13|14|15|16|17|18|19|20|21|22|23|24
25|26|27|28|29|30 Top