Itto's quite the character isn't he?
And he's meant to be an oni. Just so everybody knows that's not how onis oni. Buuuut actually that link isn't even how onis oni. This is funny enough one time I can actually talk positively about Japan's trend of revising their history.
(they are hardly alone doing this but I'm picking on them anyway [emoji])
So originally the word oni came from China and so did the mythology that went along with it. Anime fans might know that English subtitles usually translate oni to ogre but that's not even close to what they are. I'm not sure what the history is in China but Japan didn't have the words yokai (demon) or yuurei (ghost) imported from them until much later so oni meant all kinds of spiritual monsters. In fact I talked about onmyoudou before saying how these guys used ofuda to banish ghosts and could summon Shikigami which are yokai and oni under the control of onmyouji. Well back in the early days it was all just called oni.
Oni actually means monster and China still uses it as a blanket term for supernatural things like Japan used to before getting yokai and yuurei to categorize it. As you might imagine monster has no positive definition. The original oni were just personifications of any kind of catastrophe that humans couldn't explain. People could be called oni if they were violent or committed crimes. I think this all took place in the Heian period.
As words like yokai and yuurei entered and gained usage in Japan oni started to get more distinguished as evil humans while unexplained natural phenomena were blamed on yokai and illnesses were blamed on yuurei instead. At this time oni were defined as humans who deviated from normal behavior in society. This was around the time of the Sengoku period leading up to the start of the Edo period.
Following this period there was a little more scientific reasoning and all these supernatural things fell out of popularity. The Yokai Gaku was written trying to explain what these old folktales were really about. (like a flooding river wasn't the act of a moody kami) But because yokai stopped being these vicious monsters plaguing humanity other creators started using them to tell different stories. (like using yokai to make fun of the rich, as you do) So oni went from scary boogeymen to well ogres.
And that brings us to modern times where you can see all kinds of oni in fiction. Shows like Inuyasha portray them as bumbling ogres while Demon Slayer retells the story of corrupted humans. There's just one version missing as far as I can tell.
I haven't seen any anime yet that depicts oni as intelligent brats that compete against children. The Seth Rogen Oni. So this is MiHoYo channeling their otaku and giving us their own take on these creatures. Of course that's just Itto. They did go with a more traditional take on oni with Chiyo but only after she's corrupted by the Abyss so who knows what she was really like.
Are you guys pulling for this guy? Or are you going to save up for Shenhe?
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