Kinoko

Voice

Speaks in mushroom puns and cryptic warnings, so everything important he says gets laughed off or puzzled over until it's too late. He sings the same song three times across the season, and every word is true all three times. What changes is how much you know.

The arc

Kinoko introduces himself in episode two as a helpful old mushroom sage at a fork in the road, pointing the team toward a town with a corn demon problem. From then on he's a fixture, materializing whenever the team needs a direction, handing them a cryptic warning and a mushroom pun, and vanishing in a puff of spores with a tap of his cap. He travels with the Nokos, tiny adorable mushrooms that wander around aimlessly while he talks. The team adores him. The audience mostly does too. His introduction song is a charming Broadway number about the mushroom network that sees and hears everything in the forest, sung as a promise of community. It's a literal description of his surveillance system, performed for the people he's surveilling. Ume is the only one who ever asks why they trust him, and she's derailed mid-question by a passing Noko. The question never comes back.

He was human once. A farmer and mountain ascetic who asked the Tengu for immortality and received it as decay: alive forever, rotting forever, bound to the ground and unable to climb. The fable the Crow Witch sings in episode one, about a greedy farmer claimed by the roots, is about him. She's forgotten. He hasn't. Centuries later, the mycelial network that grew out of his curse runs under every forest in the country, and everything it touches, he sees. What he does with it is what he's always done: farm. His rot feeds the blight, the blight feeds the desperation, the desperation feeds the witch's harvest, and out of all of it a hero grows. Kabu's entire journey, every fork in the road, every next town, has been Kinoko's crop rotation. He can't climb the mountain. So he's growing someone who can.

The finale pays it off. He accompanies the team up Mount Madarao and weakens with every step, until he asks to be left behind partway up. It plays as a sad old man reaching his limit. It's the curse. The team descends victorious to find him waiting eagerly at the bottom, and he reassures them they did the right thing. Then he starts talking about the Tengu, how every mountain has one, how they've held too much power for too long, and while he talks, the plants around him die. He's siphoning the life out of everything nearby, fed in a way he hasn't been for centuries. The team realizes what the audience realizes with them: they may have spent the whole season working for the villain. His song plays here for the third time, same melody as episode two, no comedy left. The forest has ears, and those ears are his.

Relationships