TheFoxsCloak

Originally Posted by DrStein

Originally Posted by VitamineC

i can't really grasp my head around shuten doji's character, anyone got some pointer's ?

As an oni, Shuten is a being of pure id; she lives solely for her own pleasure, and doesn't care about anything that would prevent her from satisfying her base urges.

Mainly, that manifests in her drinking alcohol basically non-stop, because she likes the taste and the feeling of being drunk, and she doesn't care about how that effects others. She also enjoys fighting strong people, and so she recklessly challenges anyone she thinks would be a fun fight whenever she feels like it.

Now, as an oni, she is also inclined to enjoy eating human meat; however, while she has no issue doing that, she almost never actually does eat humans. The reason for that is the core of her character; the conflict between her base physical desires, like food and sex, and her "higher" desires; her love for Kintoki and Ibaraki.

Shuten is genuinely in love with Kintoki, and she genuinely loves Ibaraki as her best friend/sister figure. This leads to a conflict; Kintoki is a hero of humanity, who is absolutely intolerant of evil committed against humans. Ibaraki is a lot less moral, but she's still more of a prankster than a killer, and doesn't enjoy hurting people. She's also both really young and a former human, so she's repulsed by the idea of eating human flesh, even though she's an oni.

Shuten loves the two of them, and so doesn't want to upset them by her actions. But she's an oni, and so she's basically hard-wired to pursue her base desires 24/7 no matter what. That leaves her basically tearing herself apart due to her conflicting desires, while being constantly driven to fulfil both desires simultaneously.

Her solution to this is to just do whatever she wants in the immediate moment, and to just disregard the consequences completely. Unfortunately for Shuten, she's still fully capable of understanding how stupid and self-sabotaging that mindset is, leading to her doing very un-oni-like things like feeling bad for eating people and pining over a romance she knows she's physically incapable of having.

Ritsuka serves as basically a lesser version of Kintoki and Ibaraki, leading to her status quo at Chaldea; a blood-thirsty man-eating monster just kinda chilling at our home base and occasionally helping out even when there's nothing in it for her. She's absurdly dangerous, but she'll probably never actually do anything because she doesn't want Kintoki and Ibaraki to hate her to the point of not wanting to be around her.

But you can also never know that for sure, because she's an oni, and she could tear off your arm and eat it on a whim, with the exact same attitude she'd have if she offered you a drink.