Shukaku

A sandy-brown tanuki, Shukaku wears cursed-seal patterns, rendered black in the manga and dark blue in the anime, sprawling over its face, limbs, and tail. Its mouth cuts a jagged, tongueless line, and its eyes set yellow irides against black sclerae, each pupil forming a dark four-pointed star ringed by four small dots. In its early days, back when Hagoromo still lived, the beast looked much as it does now, only smaller, its ears stubbier and its markings scattered more thinly.

Boisterous, quick-tempered, and childish, Shukaku rambles in a grandiose, half-slurred way that makes it seem perpetually drunk, and it calls itself by the haughty ore-sama, endlessly proud of its own gifts, above all its seals and its cherished defence. In earlier days it jumped at any chance to kill, growing hungrier for it under a full moon, and it carried a sour resentment of Kurama, who counted tails to rank the beasts and branded the tanuki the feeblest, so Shukaku forever schemes to outdo him.

Centuries of being treated as a beast to slay or a weapon to wield left it loathing humans, and it liked to warn its hosts that too deep a sleep would hand it their bodies, a threat that gave Gaara his insomnia. Yet honest kindness reaches it. Once the priest Bunpuku regarded it as an equal, a touched Shukaku compared him to the Sage himself, and when Gaara later stood in the way of its sealing, the beast fought as hard to shield him. Long after the great war it grew gentler still, warming to Naruto and doting on his daughter Himawari after she braved danger to rescue it.

Shukaku comes into being when Hagoromo Ōtsutsuki breaks the Ten-Tails apart into nine named beasts and foretells that they will one day be gathered again to meet someone able to show them true power. Placed in a desert temple in the future Land of Wind, it is later seized and held in Sunagakure, where the First Kazekage tries to trade on it for his nation's fortune. Its earliest host is the Suna priest Bunpuku, shut away with it in a huge tea kettle, and a later host inspires the Third Kazekage's Iron Sand. Before Gaara is even born, the Fourth Kazekage, married to Karura, orders Chiyo to lock the beast inside the unborn child, the only one of his three offspring able to hold it; the boy never masters it, and after Yashamaru's staged betrayal drives him to unleash it fully, the Fourth quells the rampage with his Gold Dust.

Its trademark is sand: made wholly of it, the beast ignores wounds that would fell others and prides itself on an impregnable guard tough enough to stop a senjutsu-charged Susanoo blade. It looses wind bullets strong enough to flatten forests, fuses wind with earth for Magnet Release, and pours its cursed-seal markings into fūinjutsu such as its Desert Layered Imperial Funeral Seal. Killing it barely matters, since it simply returns later in a younger body.

When the Konoha Crush erupts, Gaara transforms into Shukaku against Naruto, who summons Gamabunta and, through a combination transformation, pins the beast long enough to wake Gaara with a punch. Later the Akatsuki's Deidara and Sasori tear Shukaku out into the Demonic Statue, a process that kills Gaara until Chiyo revives him. In the war's climax Gaara himself draws the beast free of Obito, and it agrees to help against Madara mainly for a shot at outdoing Kurama, guarding Gaara as memories of Bunpuku surface. Freed once more after Kaguya falls, it is briefly caught in Sasuke's seal before release. In the New Era it hides away in a small tea kettle to slip past Urashiki Ōtsutsuki, is escorted toward Konoha by Shinki, Kankurō, and Boruto, and softens toward Himawari once she saves it from a scrapyard, waving the children off when Naruto relocates it.