Shimotsuki Kuina

Shimotsuki Kuina was a childhood friend and rival of Roronoa Zoro. She was the daughter of Koushirou and a descendant of Wano Country's famed Shimotsuki Family. Her death at the age of eleven drove much of Zoro's ambitions as a swordsman, including his development of the Three Sword Style.

Appearance
She had short, dark blue hair and large, dark eyes. She wore a light pink short-sleeved shirt with a three-buttoned placket that she left unbuttoned, dark maroon shorts, and brown shoes. In the anime, while training at the dojo, she wore a white sleeveless shirt and cropped dark green pants.

Personality
Outwardly, Kuina was always self-assured and confident, bordering on arrogant toward fellow trainees. This, however, belied her fears—shaped by Koushirou's beliefs—that grown women could not match men in strength. As she dreamed of being the world's greatest swordsman, she came to resent her own body as an obstacle, and especially dreaded the onset of puberty.

These factors led to a complicated relationship between her and Roronoa Zoro, whom she often mocked as weak but simultaneously envied for being male. Eventually, on hearing him rebuke her fears and assert his own, egalitarian views on swordsmanship, she accepted him as both friend and rival.

Physical Abilities
Kuina was a formidable child prodigy in swordsmanship despite her small frame, and stood as the Isshin Dojo's strongest pupil for some time prior to her death. During this time, she would defeat Zoro (who, although a year younger, could outmatch the dojo's adult trainees) on a regular basis.

Weapons
Like her fellow trainees, Kuina mainly fought with a bamboo shinai. However, she also appeared to be experienced with live steel, as she wielded the Wado Ichimonji in her final match against Zoro with no visible difficulty.

Biography
Kuina was born to Koushirou and his wife in Shimotsuki Village approximately two years after Gold Roger's execution (roughly contemporaneous with Shiki's escape from Impel Down). Though Koushirou voiced concern over whether a daughter could properly inherit his dojo, his wife expressed hope for Kuina's strength. As a result, Kuina was duly trained in swordsmanship from a young age.

By age eleven, Kuina had become the dojo's strongest trainee, unbeatable by any other. Notably, she met two thousand bouts against the next-strongest trainee, Roronoa Zoro—and won all of them, much to Zoro's frustration. Despite this, her father maintained concerns that males would "naturally" surpass her swordsmanship with age, sowing a bitter anxiety within her.

Eventually, Kuina accepted a fresh challenge from Zoro: to fight a duel with genuine steel swords. In the dead of night, she brought her family's premier Meito Wado Ichimonji against Zoro's own blades, and won once again. However, she celebrated little; as Zoro cursed his weakness, she confessed her own insecurities, including her dream of being the world's greatest swordsman and her jealousy that Zoro, as a male, could pursue it where she could not.

At first shocked, Zoro furiously rejected Kuina's reasoning, and insisted that only effort and skill, not birth, would decide their standings as swordsmen—and whether he would ever be able to defeat her. His faith heartened Kuina, and together they made a mutual vow: that one day, one of them would become the world's greatest swordsman.

Unfortunately, this would be their last interaction, as Kuina accidentally fell down a staircase the next day, to a fatal impact. On seeing her lifeless body, Zoro tearfully accused her of breaking their vow; then, to subsume his grief and honor her memory, he swore anew to become a master swordsman that could fulfill their mutual dream.

Legacy
Kuina's memory would drive Zoro for the rest of his life, spurring him to adopt the Wado Ichimonji as his primary blade and develop the Three Sword Style to properly accommodate it. Roughly seven years after their final duel, Zoro would leave Shimotsuki Village to begin as a professional swordsman, with the ultimate goal of defeating Dracule Mihawk. Though not yet successful (as Mihawk easily overpowered him in their first encounter), Zoro currently stands as one of the world's most renowned swordsmen, as well as the second-most notorious member of the Straw Hat Pirates, behind only his captain, the Emperor Monkey D. Luffy.

For a time, Kuina's memory would also cause Zoro considerable anxiety around Tashigi, a Marine officer nearly identical to her in both appearance and interests. However, this had mostly abated by the time the Straw Hats entered the New World.

Major Battles

 * Kuina vs. Zoro (2001 times)

Anime and Manga Differences
While the manga depicts Kuina's backstory with Zoro in a single flashback during the Romance Dawn Arc, the anime replaces this with a handful of silent, context-free flashes, and moves the flashback proper to the beginning of the Baratie Arc. The anime version of the flashback also contains a number of expansions and changes:
 * In the manga, very little history is given between Kuina and Zoro outside their two thousand (and one) matches; the anime depicts their first meeting, with Zoro being a dojo-challenging delinquent who offers to become the Isshin Dojo's student if he loses, and is immediately beaten by Kuina.
 * While the manga only mentions Koushirou's doubts about her secondhand, the anime depicts her directly overhearing and confronting her father—and brooding over his words when she meets Zoro's live-steel challenge.
 * The anime also sets all of these events on the same day as her two-thousandth victory over Zoro.
 * After her vow with Zoro, the manga flashback immediately skips to her death. In contrast, the anime adds a brief scene where she demonstrates new ferocity against an adult instructor (the only time either medium depicts her fighting someone other than Zoro).
 * The manga openly depicts her corpse, being grieved over by Zoro and other trainees. The anime omits this, replacing it with a scene of her funeral (though the manga scene would later be adapted into a flashback in the anime-original Ocean's Dream Arc).
 * The funeral scene mentions that she fell while searching for a whetstone to re-sharpen the Wado Ichimonji.
 * While the manga flashback ends on the day she dies, the anime adds several follow-up scenes, including a moment where Koushirou reflects on how Zoro's rivalry had tempered her arrogance and spurred her to "surpass her natural limitations" as a woman.
 * The anime also depicts her grave in a scene showing Zoro's departure from Shimotsuki Village. Its manga equivalent (with a notably different design) would not appear until From the Decks of the World, post-timeskip.

Translation and Dub Issues
Per standard policies, the 4Kids-dubbed anime censored her death, stating that she had been permanently injured by the friends of a man she'd defeated (and removing all scenes depicting her funeral or grave). Ironically, as many fans have noted, this change is arguably more violent than her fate in the original storyline.

(Interestingly, some merchandise released alongside the 4Kids anime—such as One Piece: Grand Adventure—still treated her as a deceased character.)

Apart from this, 4Kids also somewhat altered her character in dialogue; a scene from the original where she straightforwardly mocks Zoro's weakness, for instance, was changed to "You've got to try harder."

Merchandise
She was issued alongside Zoro in a One Piece Block Figures set featuring the Straw Hats and their past mentors/loved ones.

Playable Appearances

 * One Piece: Grand Adventure
 * One Piece Treasure Cruise
 * One Piece Bon! Bon! Journey!!

Support Appearances

 * One Piece: Gear Spirit

Non-Playable Appearances

 * One Piece: Unlimited Adventure
 * One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3

Trivia

 * She is a playable character in the American-produced video game One Piece: Grand Adventure. Her appearance is initially (during Luffy's storyline) implied to be one of Zoro's dreams, though she is later encountered and recruited as an ally by Tashigi (in Smoker's storyline). Both encounters happen in the Graveyard of Ships, a game-original location possibly based off of the anime's time-warping Rainbow Mist.
 * Speculations have existed in the fandom for a very long time regarding her possible connections with Tashigi. The most popular of these―that she had secretly survived her fall and grown to be Tashigi―was disproved when SBS Volume 68 depicted Tashigi as a markedly different-looking child.
 * Kuina and Tashigi share the same voice actress in all three of the anime's English dubs (though not the original Japanese production).
 * Like Tashigi, her name comes from a flightless bird: the water-rail (水鶏). This, according to Eiichiro Oda, is a metaphor for her ambitions: "though a bird cannot fly, it does not mean it never will".
 * Her favorite foods are milk and fried eggs.

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