Kanao Tsuyuri

Kanao Tsuyuri (栗つ花ゆ落り カナヲ Tsuyuri Kanao?) is a major supporting character of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. She is a Demon Slayer of the Demon Slayer Corps, Shinobu Kocho's Tsuguko and the adopted sister of Shinobu and Kanae Kocho.Kanao is a short, young girl with large and gentle eyes of a dark lilac color that are framed by thick eyelashes. She has thin black hair, tied into a ponytail on the right side of her head and fastened by a pink and green butterfly ornament that once belonged to her adoptive sister, Kanae Kocho.[3] She has a straight fringe and two loose, chin-length strands that curve downwards from above each of her ears.

Kanao wears a slightly purple-tinted version of the standard Demon Slayer uniform, just with a knee-length pleated skirt in place of the usual tattsuke-hakama pants. Over this, she wears a short white cloak, fastened on one side by a dark pink triple knot, also sporting knee-high lace-up white boots with tan soles, heels and toes.

Sometime between then and her next appearance in the Infinity Castle, the color of Kanao's hair changes as the ends now appear tinted slightly purple before fading to a neon pink around halfway down her ponytail. After her battle with Doma, Kanao begins to wear Shinobu Kocho's hairpin rather than Kanae's, as her's was shattered during the battle. She also loses much of the vision of her right eye due to her using Flower Breathing's final form to take out the Upper Rank with her eye gaining a defined pupil with a dark ring around it and becoming deprived of its gradient.[3]

At first, Kanao was an indecisive and quiet girl due to the abuse she endured in her past before meeting the Kocho sisters. She became unable to make decisions by herself and repressed her emotions as a defense mechanism. In order to help rectify this, Kanae Kocho gave her a coin to flip to decide which path to follow when she didn't know what to do.[4] For many years, Kanao continued to show little emotion or desire. Despite this, after seeing what demons did to Aoi Kanzaki, Kiyo Terauchi and Shinobu Kocho's loved ones, Kanao developed a strong hatred against demons directly from her own will. Shinobu, oblivious to this fact, was afraid that she wasn't acting on her own volition.

Since Kanao couldn't do housework and nursing at the Butterfly Mansion like her colleagues, she opted to be a Demon Slayer. Without their knowledge, Kanao learned Flower Breathing by watching her sister Kanae.

Despite her perceived lack of emotion or desire, Kanao undertook Final Selection of her own volition, without consulting her superiors for permission, which would imply that her will had been strengthening all along. Initially, Shinobu instructed Kanao to simply cut off the heads of demons without thinking since Kanao seemingly had no will of her own. However, Kanao also eventually developed her own desire to fight.[5]

In her battle against Doma, Kanao takes uncharacteristically sadistic glee in pointing out his own lack of emotions. Fueled by hatred and spite due to her sisters' deaths by his hand, she attacks him verbally to the point where he drops his normal carefree demeanor.[10] Kanao also demonstrates extreme determination and a deep care for her family, crying for the first time in the wake of Shinobu's death and expressing that she had wished to go home together with her elder sister.[11] Kanao has also now been shown to express a greater sense of camaraderie and care for her fellow Demon Slayers other than Shinobu, as seen when she becomes visibly angry and sympathetic on Inosuke Hashibira's behalf when Doma begins gloating about his mother's death. She shows immense rage at the demon's taunts, insulting him and telling him to silence himself, which is a complete step up from the original emotionally distant relationship she had with her comrades.

Later, during the final battle against Muzan Kibutsuji, Kanao was shown to have completely regained the ability to properly express her emotions and make her own choices. Over the course of the battle, Kanao shows visible feelings of anger and terror towards the Demon King as her and her fellow Demon Slayers take him on. Even after the battle is over she continues to show emotion, proving herself to genuinely love and care for both Tanjiro and Nezuko Kamado after watching the latter's desperate attempts to reach out to her now transformed brother, which even reached the point of her sacrificing her one remaining eye to inject Tanjiro with Shinobu's last vial of the human-conversion drug in an attempt to save him.