Dehumanization of War

Lore & Background

In the world of Dororo, the warlord Taira no Masakado is driven by an insatiable hunger for territory. To fuel his campaigns, he strikes pacts with demons, and the price of each pact is a piece of his unborn son's body. The result is Hyakkimaru: a child who enters the world without eyes, ears, a mouth, arms, legs, or full skin—a human being reduced to a skeletal, faceless vessel. This is not metaphor. The dehumanization is literal, surgical, and permanent until he can claw the parts back through bloodshed.

The broader world mirrors this personal violation. Villages are razed to secure supply lines. Children like Dororo are orphaned, forced to scavenge and steal to survive, their moral compasses warped by a reality in which the only law is the sword of the strongest. Soldiers march in formation, their individual names and histories irrelevant, treated as replaceable units in the warlord's arithmetic of conquest. The common people do not choose a side; they are the ground on which the war is fought, and they are expected to bleed quietly so that a banner can be planted on the ashes.

Tezuka's original manga, written in the shadow of postwar Japan, channels a collective trauma of civilians ground beneath the machinery of state ambition. The 2019 anime adaptation, written by a new team, preserves and amplifies this lens, giving Dororo a more active, defiant voice and foregrounding the psychological toll of a world where every human interaction is filtered through the question of who wields the blade. In both versions, the message is consistent: a society that treats its people as components of a war machine has already lost them, long before the first body falls.

In Their Own Story

The rain had not stopped for three days. Hyakkimaru stood at the edge of the burned village, his new left leg still stiff from the demon's death, the muscle fibers not yet fully his own. Around him, the thatched roofs smoldered in grey puddles, and the stench of charred timber mixed with something sweeter—incense, perhaps, from a shrine no one would ever pray in again. A child's wooden horse lay in the mud, one wheel broken. He did not look at it. Looking meant feeling, and feeling meant stopping, and stopping meant the next demon would find him before the next part was his.

Behind him, on the ridge, the warlord's army moved like a slow river of black lacquer. He could not hear them—his ears were still the demon's, not yet returned—but he felt the vibration in his new leg, a low thrumming that traveled up through bone. They were marching toward the next valley. The next village. The next child's wooden horse.

He turned his faceless head toward the forest where the next demon waited, and walked. The rain filled the hollows where his eyes should have been.

Reader's Guide

The dehumanization theme is never stated as philosophy; it is shown through Hyakkimaru's physical absence. In the opening beats of both the manga and the 2019 anime, we meet a boy with no face, no hands, no legs—literally a weapon that has been given a heartbeat. His first act is not speech or expression but killing. The audience is forced to confront a human being who has been reduced to function before he is allowed to be a person. This is the war's logic made flesh: you are useful, or you are nothing.

Dororo's arc reinforces this from the civilian side. As a child thief surviving in the war's wake, she has learned to move through the world as a ghost, to trust no one, to see every adult as either a threat or a resource. Her survival instincts are the direct product of a society that decided children were collateral. When she and Hyakkimaru bond, it is an act of re-humanization—two people who have been stripped of their roles choosing to see each other as whole.

Visually, the motifs are relentless. The missing limbs are not hidden; they are the design. Hyakkimaru's facelessness, the bare sockets where eyes should be, the empty sleeves, the absence of a mouth—these are not injuries to be covered but the central image of the character. The sword, when he holds it, is not a tool but a prosthetic, the only limb that makes him dangerous enough to exist. The warlord's banners, the endless ranks of identical soldiers, the villages reduced to ash and geometry—all reinforce the idea that the war machine grinds individuality into uniformity. Tezuka's clean, iconic linework and the 2019 anime's stark color palettes make the absence of body parts visually devastating: what is not drawn is as important as what is.

Did You Know?

• Hyakkimaru's missing body parts are not merely a plot device for a collection quest; each reclamation requires him to kill the demon that took it, meaning the only path to becoming a whole human being is through sustaine
• Dororo, the companion character, is a child thief whose entire survival skill set—stealing, lying, moving unseen—was forged by the chaos of the warlord's campaigns, making her a living portrait of civilian dehumanization
• The 2019 anime was produced by MAPPA and aired in 2019, adapting Tezuka's 1960s manga with a modern sensibility while preserving the core theme of a war-torn land where people are treated as expendable resources.
• The warlord's pacts with demons represent a literal transaction: human body parts exchanged for military power, framing the dehumanization of war as a deliberate, contractual choice rather than an accidental byproduct.