#kny rui
Upper/lower moon and pillar switcheroo V2 , based on this old sketch X
I’ve always wanted to render this concept digitally, and I finally did!! My wrist can chill for a whileee lel. On a side note, thinking about their swapped backstories and character parallels is hella fun
So sad news for the english dub side of the demon slayer fandom: Apparently Billy Kametz the english voice actor for Rui/Lower Moon Five (among other great characters from other fandoms) passed away this past Thursday. (May post a drawing later)
So demon slayer headcannon:
I headcannon and i am convinced that this could easily be cannon that if Rui actually cared about the rankings he could have easily taken Enmu’s place as lower moon one as he was before his death.
Here’s why:
So for one, I’m pretty sure just about everyone knows that Rui was Muzan’s favorite lower moon (and probably his main favorite out of all of them) and the things he said about Rui during the last episode of season one were said because he was upset that he was gone, But Muzan tends to give his blood to those in his favor who do what he wants them to and it wouldn’t surprise me if that went double for his favorites. And then there’s several things that happen during the mount natagumo arc and during the movie that makes me think that Rui is atleast as strong as Enmu. Firstly theres the thing where it took Tanjiro using a sun breathing move and the force of several explosions provided by nezuko’s blood demon art to even get close to taking off Rui’s head (and no rui taking his own head off to mess with him doesn’t count) and giyuu completely taking over the fight to kill him while with Enmu it only took one of his water breathing moves and a few good assist hits from inosuke while zenitsu, nezuko and rengoku were keeping him distracted by protecting the passengers to actually take Enmu’s head off. Now this COULD be explained by Tanjiro training and figuring out the total concentration constant thing, and while yes that probably helped but probably not enough to go up a full four kizuki ranks. And lastly there is their own respective fighting/hunting styles or since im a huge dnd nerd; their classes: so Rui has very high dexterity stat with athletics and acrobatic’s bonuses and due to his high dexterity stat pretty high speed, he has decent strength stat, okay intelligence and wisdom stats, a decent charisma stat and an almost op constitution stat so the best class i could compare him to is a monk-rouge duel class with homebrew cantrips (spells that can be cast without taking up to much energy) and most likely usually had to deal with his prey fighting back and giving him a workout. While Enmu has high wisdom and intelligence stats, an op constitution stat, a decent strength stat, a decent charisma stat and an okay dexterity stat so the best class i could compare him to is a duel class wizard-bard that only uses spells that involve sleep and usually knocks his prey unconscious not getting the work out he could get if he didn’t and instead knocks out multiple victims and gut-loads himself. And usually in that kind of fight the monk-rouge comes out on top unless they get caught by a sleep spell; Basically that means that in an actual fight the only logical way that Enmu could get Rui is with a sleep spell and knock him out but because Rui is the group favorite he probably has at the very least some knowledge on the rest of the lower ranks powers and probably knows the trick to Enmu’s sleep spell ability.
Thinking about this again and IF this were cannon this would explain why Muzan killed off all the other lower moons besides Enmu aside from him just having a temper tantrum because his favorite demon was dead; Rui was stronger than the rest of the lower moons with Enmu being his only real competition (although to be fair Kamanue didn’t get much of a chance to prove himself) so Enmu would have been the only one he considered “useful” (aside from being a simp).
