Kon

For most of his existence Kon animates a modest toy lion no bigger than a doll. Stitched seams crisscross its tan plush body, a lone button marks its belly, and four flat white claws cap each stubby limb. Beady black eyes, pink-lined ears, and a bristly brown mane sit atop a head that looks oddly flattened in profile, while a little tail dangles at the back. After Sōsuke Aizen's downfall, tampering by the Twelfth Division lets the same doll swell into a hulking, heavily muscled version whose head stays doll-sized, a change that can be reversed with a remote.

Lecherous and girl-obsessed, Kon exploits his cuddly shape to get pressed against women, saving special fixation for the well-endowed such as Orihime Inoue and Rangiku Matsumoto. He has a sweet tooth for caramel and a swaggering streak that leads him to crown himself the 'King of New York.' Beneath the comedy runs a serious conviction about the worth of life. Having spent years trapped in pill form dreading the day he would be found and discarded, he refuses to kill anything at all, will gamble his own safety to rescue even the meanest creature, and bristles at anyone who treats their creations as disposable.

Kon rolled off the line as one of the final Mod-Souls of Project Spearhead, an effort to build artificial souls that would boost dead human bodies into Hollow-fighting shape. Soul Society branded the program inhumane and ordered every surviving unit destroyed, but Kon slipped away and came to rest inside a Soul Candy dispenser at the back of Kisuke Urahara's shop, tossed into a box of rejects. The stuffed lion he would later inhabit was a cheap knockoff of a cartoon character, bought at a festival for a child who promptly threw it out.

His story with Ichigo begins when Rukia Kuchiki, needing a way to pull Ichigo from his body, buys the very dispenser holding Kon. The Mod-Soul seizes Ichigo's frame and treats it as a playground, vaulting over rooftops and manhandling his classmates, until a Hollow attack lays bare his refusal to let anything die. Ichigo and Rukia choose to hold on to him, lodge him in the toy lion, and settle on the name Kon, short for Kaizō Konpaku. From then on he repeatedly minds Ichigo's body and family, often to his own misery, whether taped inside a bathroom, roped into a neighborhood soccer match, or torn apart in a scuffle over his own plush shell. The Twelfth Division snatches him during the fake-town swap, and years later Urahara rebuilds his enlarged form into a two-way communicator linking Soul Society and Hueco Mundo. Tagging along as the group ascends to the Soul King's realm, he cushions the Shinigami's falls and gawks at its resident spirits before the war's end returns him to the Kurosaki household, where he eventually keeps company with Ichigo's son.