Momotaro

Voice

Answers every provocation with calm sincerity, which makes him impossible to argue with and infuriating to lose to. Shouts the names of his own attacks in battle, and when Kabu points out that's tactically stupid, explains that he learned every one of them from his best friends.

The arc

The team arrives in Aokusa mid-battle and stops short: the boy fighting the rice demon has a peach for a head. He isn't the Momotaro of the legends, the one Kabu was singing about back in episode one. He's a boy who was cursed the same way Kabu was, and whose town took one look at the peach and named him after the story. The name stuck because he kept earning it. He protects the rice fields and refuses to kill the demon that attacks them; he'd sacrifice his own crops before he'd take a life. The town adores him for it. Kabu takes one look at a kid with his exact curse living his exact dream and hates him within the hour, and the worst part is that Momotaro never notices there's a competition, because for him there isn't one. When Kabu finally says his belief out loud, that demons should be killed, Momotaro asks the question that follows Kabu for the rest of the season: have you ever killed one?

His flaw takes the whole episode to surface because it doesn't look like one. He really is that good, and that's the trap. His humility is real and costs him nothing, while the people around him do the unseen work and get none of the light. It's Saru, his oldest companion, who pays the whole bill at once: the rice demon they've been fighting all episode turns out to be him. Saru surrenders his seed willingly, no violence needed, which quietly contradicts everything Kabu believes about the cursed, and asks Momotaro the question the episode was built around: am I really your best friend? The episode ends with both teams sobered, and with Kabu carrying a new chain-scythe, a gift from Momotaro, built and maintained by Saru. Whatever it means to Kabu going forward, it was someone else's labor first.

Relationships