Karas/Characters

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Characters of the anime series Karas:

Karas

Yousuke Otoha

The recently-appointed Karas of Shinjuku, tasked with preserving the balance between the worlds of humanity and the youkai by the Will Of The City... and also with taking down his renegade predecessor, Eko. A quiet, kindly young man who has acquired the nickname of 'Doctor Karas' due to the medical help and counselling he offers to sick youkai when he's off-duty. Used to be a hitman for the Yakuza, until an attempt to escape his life of crime led to him being fatally shot by his former comrades. The Will saw its opportunity, and gave him a job offer he couldn't refuse. One resurrection later, he was putting his considerable people-slicing skills to use as a preserver of the city and all-around hero.

Eko Hoshunin

The series's main villain, the original Karas of Shinjuku. Grew disillusioned with the city's human population over the centuries, thanks to their perceived corruption and abandonment of the old ways at the expense of the youkai. Eventually decided to go completely rogue, imprisoning his Yurine and launching an assault on the city with his hand-picked band of mechanical monstrosities to reclaim it in the name of the youkai, even if he had to enslave every human in Shinjuku to do it.

  • Artificial Limbs: His left leg.
  • Big Bad
  • Fallen Hero
  • Knight Templar: Seeks to preserve the youkai by any means necessary, up to and including forcing them all to become vampiric cyborg abominations and turning the humans into little more than living larders for them. Doesn't see the slightest problem in this.
  • Light Is Not Good: He's a thoroughly nasty piece of work, and in contrast to the dark, sombre Otoha, he's almost always suffused in light and bright colours.
  • Oedipus Complex: Sees the Yurine as his mother and the Will Of The City as his father, and seeks to supplant the latter. Do the maths.
  • Really Seven Hundred Years Old: He's been around for centuries.
  • White-Haired Pretty Boy
  • Who Wants to Live Forever?: It was the hundreds of years of watching the world he was assigned to protect slowly decay that sent him over the edge, and he firmly believes that the same will happen to Otoha in time.

Homura

A Karas from another town who popped over to see what was going on in Shinjuku. Prohibited from interfering with another city's business, but eventually cajoles her Yurine into letting her help Otoha out.

  • Action Girl
  • Arrogant Kung Fu Guy: A mild, gender-flipped example. Mostly wants to intervene in Shinjuku in order to show off her superior abilities, but doesn't cause too much friction since by that point, Otoha needs all the help he can get.
  • Big Damn Heroes: Pretty much every time she's authorised to go Karas, she ends up saving Otoha's hide. Eventually, he returns the favour.
  • Blade on a Stick: Her Weapon of Choice, in contrast to the Shinjuku Karas's katanas.
  • Blood Knight
  • Girlish Pigtails
  • Henshin Hero
  • Sweet Tooth
  • The Worf Effect: Set up as a more capable, experienced Karas than Otoha, but ends up getting ignominiously defeated and incapacitated by Eko in order to demonstrate his unstoppability. To be perfectly fair, though, our hero wasn't doing much better until she stepped in, and she bought enough time for him to come up with a Plan B.
  • Zettai Ryouiki


Mikura

Nue

A renegade Mikura who fled Shinjuku some time ago, Nue has returned to the city to settle old scores. Masquerading as a laid-back, homeless drifter who lives on the Shinjuku public transport system, he hunts down his former comrades whilst struggling against the bloodlust that threatens to consume him.

Suiko

A powerful kappa enlisted and upgraded by Eko to help him take over Shinjuku. Now masquerades as a professional wrestler, and feeds by snatching victims from public bathrooms.

Wanyudou

Eko's personal servant, Wanyudou is a calm, dapper gentleman in his human form, and a gigantic, wheeled abomination in his Mikura form. He feeds from motorists in Shinjuku's road tunnels, distracting them with his alternate form of a phantasmic red car before ambushing them from behind.

Tsuchigumo

The sole female Mikura, Tsuchigumo is a quiet, beautiful woman half the time, and a giant, loathsome mechanical spider for the other half. She is loyal, efficient, and frequently assigned by Eko to the missions he deems most crucial to his cause.

Kamaitachi

Perhaps the strangest of the Mikura, Kamaitachi is a whirling, bladed berserker with a grating, mechanical voice and no apparent human form. Given his high visibility, he rarely ventures outside Eko's headquarters except on the few occasions when the centuries-old Karas doesn't care about being subtle and just wants something dead quickly.

  • Everything's Better with Spinning: For him, anyway. For his enemies... not so much.
  • Wicked Weasel: His original form, mythologically-speaking, was a trio of wind-riding, flesh-slicing weasels. He inherited the M.O., if not the appearance.
  • Helicopter Blender: Uses his many spinning blades both for flight and as weapons.
  • Laughing Mad
  • Monster Clown: He strongly resembles one in appearance, at least.
  • Razor Wind: Given who he was pre-Mikurafication, it should come as no surprise that he's capable of doing this.
  • The Unintelligible: His speech is so heavily filtered and modulated that he very nearly becomes this. Dub watchers have it even worse, since he's still subtitled in Japanese.

Ushi-Oni/Police Commissioner

One of the most brutal and sadistic Mikura, Ushi-Oni takes the form of a hulking, gear-toothed bull/spider hybrid. His human form is decidedly more notable, though - he's the Shinjuku police commissioner, Narumi and Sagisaka's boss, who spent years as Eko's man on the inside in the city's local government in exchange for getting the lion's share of the food once his master's plan came to fruition.


Humans

Kure Narumi

Minoru Sagisaka

Hinaru

Yoshiko Sagisaka

Reiji

Governor

Youkai

The Yurines

Amefurikozo

Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Karas/Characters?oldid=1485606"