Shige Sakagami

Shige Sakagami
Anime Manga
Kanji	坂上 繁
Rōmaji	Sakagami Shige
Characteristics
Race	Human
Gender	Female
Age	19
Height	5'8
Weight	150 lbs
Birthday	May 13
Hair Color	Ash Blonde to White
Eye Color	Blue to Green
Professional Status
Affiliation	Demon Slaying Corps
Occupation	Demon Slayer
Personal Status
Status	Active
Relatives	Masakado Sakagami (Father, Unknown) Utamaro Sakagami (Grandfather, Deceased †) Sakuya Sakagami (Mother, Alive) Goro Sakagami (Younger Brother, Alive) Risa Sakagami (Younger Sister, Alive)
Debut
Anime Debut	Episode 23
Manga Debut	//INSERT INFO HERE//
Portrayal
Japanese Voice	Atsuko Tanaka (Lisa Lisa - Jojo's Bizarre Adventure)
English Voice	Wendee Lee (Lisa Lisa - Jojo's Bizarre Adventure)

Shige Sakagami (坂上 繁 Sakagami Shige) is a Kinoto ranked Demon Slayer in the Demon Slaying Corps and a member of the Sakagami Family. She is also a close affiliate of the Butterfly Estate.

Appearance

Shige is a young woman of an alarmingly above average stature and bulky build, especially for a woman. Often, she is mistaken to be male for her general appearance and voice. She has pale skin, a strong androgynous face with blue to green eyes lined with heavy lashes. She has long, shaggy platinum blonde and white tipped hair with bangs flying in front of her face and thick locks tied together with red twine. The longer part of her hair is tied in a low ponytail.

Her Demon Slayer Uniform is worn in such a way that her haori doesn't get carried with the wind. Over her uniform, she wears a light blue haori that gradients down to a medium teal. There is a light blue triangular pattern with a thin zigzag line above them at the hems of her sleeves. Instead of wearing it loosely, she tucks in her haori underneath her hakama. She wears blue open fingered gloves and tabi, both covered in darker blue armor on her shins, top of feet, arms and knuckles. Shige also wears a scarf decorated with tessalated purple and yellow triangles.

Personality

Shige comes off as a cross and no-nonsense, often with a short fuse causing her to be snappish at others. She's more often than not extremely tense and has a high likeliness of reacting with hostility. When she instigates any sort of interaction, while not hostile, she is curt with her words and doesn't cut corners. Any show of opposition, she will harshly scold another. This has earned her some derision from many lower ranked Demon Slayers.

Her tense nature affects her social ability. She never really sticks to anyone else outside people she has already established trust in, and that number can be counted on one hand. To this very few select people does she ever show any proper kindness to, but even that means she remains curt and can result in some bickering. It becomes very difficult to weed out her kinder nature underneath her harsh defense mechanisms.

As a result of her upbringing, Shige is prideful and harsh. She sets the bar high for others and herself, often having expectations and faith that people will be able to come through. Mostly, this has only made her more disappointed, often equating others failures as her own, feeding more into her terrible self-esteem. This shows that Shige herself does have faith in others, but due to repetitive disappointment, her attitude towards others have soured and jaded.

Despite being an excellent Demon Slayer and Swordsman, both traits acknowledged by the vast majority of the Demon Slayer Corps, Shige holds herself in extremely low regard. She suffers an inferiority complex that makes her unable to see her own worth outside the approval of her family, to amend for mistakes that were never hers in the first place. Once she's responsible over someone else, their mistakes are hers, and she takes these mistakes harder than she really should.

Shige is not above tenderness and genuine feeling, as shown when despite her disappointments in others are revealed, she will not hesitate to risk an arm and leg for her fellow Demon Slayers and humans. She's very devoted to her duty with a strong will to fight for humanity. She laments all that she has lost, and has never made peace with any of these, and to prevent more guilt from consuming her, she will protect others regardless of their opinion on her, her own opinions, and the relationship between her and others. This is ultimately shown when she was willing to give her life for her partner and close friend, Jinzo Jo, also to help her ease her own guilt for being unable to save or help Kyojuro Rengoku, her childhood friend.

After the Demon Train Arc, Shige's grief and a subsequent reality check has caused her to mellow down and let down her walls, becoming more receptive to others and forcing her to make peace with her demons. While not any much friendlier, her grief ridden state has made her more empathic and humbled, also showing a genuinely accepting side of her. As the series progresses, Shige becomes much more in tune with her emotions and not hiding them behind her harsh demeanor.

Abilities and Powers

Natural Abilities

• Heightened Perception: Shige has excellent eyesight and can percieve even the tinest movements, including nervous twitches and indicators of disguised demons. This Ability of hers renders her also very able to read lips.
• Enhanced Precsion: Shige's form and perception have given her excellent pinpoint precision to aid in her Breath Style. Her movements are sharp and exact on certain weak spots on certain demons.
• Enhanced Endurance: Aside from the contribution of her bulkier body build, Shige's endurance is much higher compared to a regular human. As shown when punched out by other people, she does not flinch. Weaker demons have the same lack of effect when hitting her.
• Enhanced Strength: Also thanks to her strong build, Shige is particularly strong. She is able to carry weights much heavier than she is, hurl people, demons, and to an extent, even furniture. Her strikes are also powerful, and her strength makes her precision much more effective.
• Total Concentration Breathing: Shige is one of the Demon Slayers who are in a constant state of Total Concentration Breathing. Her Ability is well developed by years of training under her family.
• Demon Slayer Mark: Shige awakened to her Demon Slayer Mark during the Red Light District Arc in the fight against Daki and Gyutaro, stemming from her still present grief over Kyojuro's death at the hands of an Upper Moon. Her Slayer Mark appears as two pink, semi-triangular streaks on her cheeks. Her precision becomes immense and further enhances her Strength.

Swordsmanship

The Breath of Foam is a personal breath style developed by Shige Sakagami. It is derived from The Breath of Water. The breath style consists of strong, precise movements, whose many forms have thrusting and piercing movements, with minimal slashing. The style deals with incapacitation and is a breath style well made to support other breath styles, it's techniques compatible with other breath styles. The Breath of Foam's stance and techniques require thrusting motions, which Shige developed to be most compatible with the wakizashi, her weapon of choice.

To see the whole list of Techniques for this Breath Style, you can find the information in this page: Breath of Foam.

History

Shige was born into the Sakagami family, a family of Demon Slayers that have dated all the way back from the late Edo Period. The Sakagami Family was one of the Slayer Families that more often than not provided the Water Pillars for the Demon Slayer Corps. While Shige was not the heiress to the position, her grandafather, Utamaro Sakagami, was at one point a Water Pillar. Hence, as a result of being a direct descendant of Utamaro, the pressure was put onto Shige, being the eldest child. However; prior to the pressure put unto her shoulders, her father, Masakado, abdicated his inaguration as Water Pillar, causing the whole Sakagami family to plunge into disarray. Since then, Shige had been put through harsh training at a very early age, enhancing her precision and form. From a young age, all eyes were on Shige, as she now carried the name of her family.

Masakado's abandonment of the family left a stain on the Sakagami Family Tree. Since then, the Sakagami have been uptight and conscious about their relations with other Slayer Families, such as the Rengoku Family. In a "last ditch effort" to save face, Shige was more often than not made to have close relations with the sons of Shinjuro Rengoku, Kyojuro and Senjuro, whom she developed a very close relationship to growing up. Her friendship with the sons have allowed her to cope with the stress she has experiences under her grandfather's tutelage. Growing up, she was known to have taken care of the Rengoku children and took them out of the home to handle with their mother's death and subsequently troubled father.

When her younger siblings were born, Shige was expected to be a co-trainer to them beside her grandfather, as her father was now absent. This resulted in her keeping a close relationship with her mother instead, often hiding from the comments from the rest of the Sakagami family. However; training didn't stop there. Enough pressure from her family had caused her to feel like her father's mistakes were on her shoulders. With how highly her father was treated before his abandonment, she thus aimed to earn that level of respect he had. It soon developed into a complex that she felt she carried her family's sins and expectations on her back. This was developed when she was still at an impressionable age, so this complex stuck until her adulthood.

Trained in the Breath of Water, Shige's fighting style was more precise than fluid. So, as a result of this, her inferiority complex worsened. While she could do the forms correctly, mastery was difficult. While her grandfather kept pushing her, he came from a place where he knew she was going to make it. Eventually, during one of her harsher exercises, Shige was able to develop a new Breath Style of her own: The Breath of Foam. She knew it was going against her grandfather's wishes, and her family would be in uproar; but a part of her wished that despite straying from the original Breath of Water, she would be accepted and put in the Final Selection. Despite some minor disputes about her decision and deriviation, overall, the reaction towards her Breath of Foam was recieved well by most of the family. But, with this new development, the pressure increased exponentially. If only it could please her family and have her make peace with her father's mistakes, she aimed to become the next Water Pillar.

She passed remarkably during the Final Selection, as expected of a Sakagami. However; the reaction from her family was dry, as if they expected it from the start. While this felt like an achievment for her survival, it wasn't a big deal. Startting from this, her overachieving performance and attitude was an overcompensation for her complex. One of her first missions resulted in a disaster when she was pushed in the way of an incoming demon. Since then, she hadn't forgiven herself for it. Despite her rather quick rise in the ranks after pushing herself from that failure, she fell short of her position as a Pillar, against Giyuu Tomioka, whom she grew to resent because of her own misgivings.

Throughout her job as a Demon Slayer, she had been particularly partnered up with a swordsman wielding an unorthodox style and Nichirin Blade. She recognizes him as Jinzo Jo, a shocking survivor from the Final Selection. Since partnering with Jinzo, Shige's career soared, and she finally gained herself a confidant after so long. While she expected this to keep her mind off of things, nothing seemed to help, and she only spiraled further down into her own self-deprecating thought processes. Despite her rank, Shige continues to remain grim, not once thinking of her achievements and respect she earned within the Demon Slayer Corps.

Some years before the main series takes place, Shige has been known to help the Kakushi and assisted in taking the injured to the Butterfly Estate. Currently, she takes up on a lot of main jobs as well as taking the near fatally injured to the Estate before the arrival of the Kakushi. She is not a known Tsuguko nor a candidate for Pillar.

Trivia

• The joke was that I thought of bubbles, hence Breath of Foam. Jojo is bound to have invaded my creative process HUHU and HermesYap made her a Joseph hAHA
• Shige can easily use a regular katana, but her Breath Style's form demands her to use a weapon thats easier for precision. The use of her wakizashi is for the covenience of slashing. The Breath of Foam can translate into other weapons like jutte and sai for their piercing ability.
• Shige is often found in gag scenes when she shows any relative kindness towards someone. She is squick to deny, but as the series goes on, she mellows down about it.
• Her anger has at one point been likened to that of Sanemi Shinazugawa. Both did not appreciate that comment.
• Shige has found audience with all the Pillars, and when asked about it and how she can be almost "casual" with them is her "privelege" coming from a Slayer family like the Rengoku Family.
• Shige loves all noodles. Ramen, Udon, Soba, Fried, anything. The one time she is not seen fuming is when a bowl of noodles is presented to her.
• One of Shige's endearing names from Jinzo is "Awa-chan" or "Bubble-chan" in English. Shinobu Kocho has adopted this nickname for her, too.
• Shige mentioned at one point, her family told her she was betrothed to a Slayer from another Slayer Family. The engagement was called off because of her fiance's death. She mourned him, but she was not truly attached to him.
• It's very easy to mistake Shige as a male at first glance because of her name, stature and behavior. Because of Tanjiro's enhanced smell, he was able to know off the bat that Shige is actually female.
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