#EDIT: NO ONE TOLD ME I FORGOT HER TATOOS

[pocket-dragon]

MeetingKarlach.png

[pasttorn]

       -- HC. quick rambling of the beauty of akaza’s demon design under the cut ! !

       -- I’M just super obsessed over how a demon’s experience as a human vastly impacts their design as a demon, so this is just me rambling about how gotouge did a beautiful job while designing / writing akaza.

TATOO LINES ! ! as told in the story itself, they’re meant to represent criminals in that lived in that time period, since they needed a way to give someone a ‘ criminal record ‘ ( aka the three lines on his forearms that indicate his pickpocketing crimes ). the way the one’s on his forearms are erased, & instead they proceed to just wrap around his entire body, kind of make it seem / show that he's a sinner from head to toe. he's committed so many crimes ( ie. making empty promises, massacring an entire dojo, pick pocketing, allowing his father to die, allowing koyuki & keizo to die, becoming a demon, etc. ) that he's completely covered in them.

HAIR ! ! is just a personal take but-- hair taking on a pink hue due to him bathing in the blood of the people the other dojo. the manga shows his entire face & head & body covered in blood, &  i wouldn't be surprised if the pink was a watered / saturated version of the red that had covered him in his last moments before the transformation.

FINGERS & TOES being blue ! ! granted, in manga they look black, the same hue as blood ‘cause of the black & white of the manga, so i went mostly w/ that while considering this-- but that and the red / pink on his fingernails representing how, , , he'll never be able to wash off the blood of his enemies / family nor his sins off of his hands. his fingers will always be ' tainted ' for as long as he exists.

TECHNIQUES ! ! as told in the manga, his techniques are based on keizo's soryuu style ( which he admits bc he says that he soiled his master's style-- yet another crime to add in his book )-- but also him naming his techniques after fireworks & his compass needle looking like one of koyuki's ( who's name means snow / snowflake ) snowflake hairpins without actually remembering her hurts me, because the impact she had on him was that big.

HALLUCINATIONS ! not part of his design, but i really, really love how gotouge played around with his memories during his fight with tanjirou. up until now, when a demon or someone remembered their dead family members-- no one reacted to whatever they did ( ie. them looking somewhere, like kyou looking at his mother ) because it’s mostly in their mind / something they themselves see. but the fact that the memory fragments of keizo & koyuki that surfaced during the fight made akaza have a physical reaction to them ( ie. tanjirou noting multiple times that akaza was acting strange or that he was looking / attacking somewhere that had nothing ) is so important & good to me, because it shows just how much it actually impacted him.

PUNS ! this might just be the author's intent to a pun, or just me trying to connect things that shouldn't connect together ( since the way  their names are written / the characters used for their names don't mean the colours themselves but listen ,, ,  ). haku means white / soul & aka means red. hakuji’s white soul has been literally tainted red & turned into akaza-- & it might not have been meant to be read like that but i’m still sad.

quick edit bc i forgot to add but-- this has nothing to do w/ his design, just a thing i noticed while reading ( which is kind of part of his design ) that breaks my heart because ! ! when he gets home from visiting his father’s grave to tell him of his marriage & receives the news of their deaths, he’s with travelling clothes. but when he’s massacring the dojo, he’s wearing the soryuu disciple uniform ( the one keizo gave him ), meaning he changed clothes before leaving just so he could kill them with it on.