laikaflash

They didn’t have to give a lot of the off-screen Fu-Ma members names and such, but man do I run with that.

• Taki was orphaned quite young after a plague, which took a toll on the Fu-Ma clan’s numbers, claimed the lives of her parents and her brothers. The clan’s leader Toki took it upon himself to raise her after finding her by her family’s graves. She became something of a golden child to him over time for her demon-hunting prowess.
• In her childhood, she and Chie became friends in spite of Toki and Hachibei’s rivalry. Hachibei didn’t mind this too much, as Toki’s animosity hadn’t rubbed off on her.
• While Taki was initially trained solely to fight and seal demons, she’d also hang out in Enkai’s smithy to watch him at the forge. Enkai humored her at first, and she listened to him for hours about forging magic weapons before Toki found her after having searched the whole village.
• Toki’s sternness rubbed off on her more than she cares to think. Comparing her to her foster-father directly to her face is… ill-advised. (Read: lucky if she just lets you off with a glare.)

(Originally posted to Tumblr on August 11, 2024. Small note: Toki lives in my head rent-free in a "he didn't used to be that fucked up" kind of way.)


Some musings on how I write Taki, sort an addendum to my headcanons post from January 25, 2025:

I’ve been mulling over this one line from the first part of her Edge Master mode in Soul Blade:

Among this ninja clan, many have extraordinary abilities that have been lost or forgotten by the general population.

Taki is established as one of the many “blessed with supernatural powers” (in Japanese: 霊力, “spiritual power”). I’m not terribly interested in expanding on how the magic works here, but I am interested in how it’s a point of pride for Taki. Her adoptive father and mentor Toki was head of the Fu-Ma clan and one of its most skilled ninjas. I imagine she did Toki proud before his hubris kicked in.

This is a bit of my speculation, but Taki may well have been born to rank and file Fu-Ma ninjas. On a narrative level, I think the former reinforces her being a foil to Mitsurugi, a farmer’s son turned samurai. (Aside from the common contrasting portrayals of ninjas and samurai in fiction.) Both lost their parents and siblings at a young age to disease, though in Taki’s case, the specifics are left to the imagination. It could simply be that it happened before she was old enough to retain clear memories of them. The key thing is that she became what she is because of Toki.

I can see Toki hanging that over her head any chance he gets. (Something like “You would’ve been nothing if it weren’t for me.”) I’m not saying he can’t have some genuine emotional attachment to her, it’s just that he’s going to be a self-serving bastard about it and Taki will have none of that.