http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Manga/Inuyasha

Miroku, Kagome, From left to right: Inuyasha Shippo , and Sango

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Inuyasha is an enormously popular anime based upon the similarly popular manga of the same name by Rumiko Takahashi. The manga was serialized from 1996 to 2008 in Shonen Sunday, while the anime ran for seven seasons (167 episodes) on Japanese television from 2000 to 2004. [adult swim] aired the final episode of a very decent English-language dub in October 2006 and continued to air it in the very early Sunday morning slot almost continuously (the only other show to have run longer on [as] is Cowboy Bebop) until 2014. In Canada, the dub aired on YTV where it was one of the channel's most popular anime shows. Inuyasha and several other supporting characters from the show appear in the Massive Multiplayer Crossover game Sunday VS Magazine: Shuuketsu! Choujou Daikessen.

Japanese Ordinary Middle School Student Kagome Higurashi, granddaughter of a Shinto priest, has the ability to climb down into an ancient well on the grounds of her grandfather's shrine and, in doing so, Time Travel to allegedly-feudal-Japan; this sounds cool until you learn that Youkai, goblins, vengeful ghosts, malevolent wizard-priests, short-tempered twelve-foot-tall ogres, and all manner of other creepy-crawlies are everywhere and you can barely swing your arms without hitting one of them. Significantly, this is one of the few Japanese fantasy anime that isn't set in a pseudo-medieval-European fantasy world; just about everything in it is based on Japanese myths and legends. Another noteworthy difference from most anime is that almost all of the characters who are supposed to be Japanese humans are actually depicted with black hair, instead of other Hair Colors.

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On her first trip through the well, Kagome meets Inuyasha, an obnoxious, abrasive, arrogant half-youkai teenage boy with long flowing white hair and super-cute doggy ears on top of his head. (His father, a dog youkai of some kind, had a taste for human women.) Inuyasha, needless to say, actually has a heart of gold, though he requires Kagome's insistence to do good deeds. You all knew that was coming, didn't you? Right? Right.

Kagome happens to be the reincarnation of the miko that Inuyasha once loved fifty years in his past, who just happened to be the one who fired a sacred arrow which sealed him to a sacred tree and essentially killed him. Kagome's arrival in the past is pivotal in that she is the one who releases Inuyasha from this "death" by pulling the arrow from his chest; her connection with his past love allows her to perform this otherwise impossible feat.

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The small-scale structure of the story is episodic, with many a Monster of the Week (usually literally a monster). However, in addition to the romance angle between Inuyasha and Kagome, there is an overarching plot about the pair and their adventuring companions — Shippo, an orphaned, mischievous and immature kitsune; Miroku, a cunning Buddhist monk with wandering hands and a ticking time bomb in his right hand in particular; Sango, the latest (plus unfortunately and very recently the last) of a renowned clan of demon slayers, whose signature weapon is a gigantic boomerang made of demon bones; and Kirara, Sango's nekomata companion, who can change from an adorable two tailed kitten to an enormous flying sabretooth at the drop of a hat — wandering pseudo-medieval-Japan in order to collect the pieces of the shattered Shikon no Tama/Jewel of Four Souls. This quest eventually turns into a struggle against the Big Bad — the evil incarnate that is Naraku, a human-turned-youkai that seeks the Shikon Jewel in order to taint it and become a full-fledged youkai with powers far beyond anything any youkai has ever known, and whose plotting turns out to be behind just about all of the miseries that have befallen every main character.

And, just to throw some family drama into the mix, on occasion the heroes also have to deal with Inuyasha's elder half-brother Sesshomaru: a full blooded youkai who already looks down on his younger brother for his human blood, and outright despises him when it turns out their long dead father left one of his cool swords, Tessaiga, to his hanyō son rather than his 'rightful heir'. Sesshomaru instead inherited the blade known as Tenseiga, which he regards as a gross insult since the sword can't even hurt a living creature, instead being able to restore the dead to life. While at first he's determined to take Tessaiga for himself and kill Inuyasha should he get in his way, Sesshomaru later seeks a weapon to prove he is equal to, or even greater than, his father...and eventually, as the brothers repeatedly clash with each other, battle the enemies their father left in his wake and amass both power and crucial character development from the hard lessons he prepared for them, Sesshomaru and his entourage also get drawn into the end goal of taking down Naraku.

Over the course of the series, Inuyasha and company confront Naraku several times, but each time he gets away, gaining more shards of the Jewel — and an extra power or two — in the process. Forcing Inuyasha to gain a new power as well just to ward off Naruku's attacks. Rise, rinse, and repeat till its conclusion.

The original manga eventually reaches a resolution, but it takes its sweet time to do so (fifty-six books when the main plot would really need only, say, twenty), and the first anime was Cut Short with no proper ending due in large part to actually catching up with the production of the manga and running out of episodal stories to do. The 26-episode anime series Inuyasha: The Final Act picks up where the original anime left off and covers the remaining chapters of the manga through to the story's conclusion.

You can find dubbed and subtitled versions of both InuYasha and The Final Act on Hulu and the first two seasons of the original series on Netflix. The show (in dubbed form) aired from 2002-2014 (over a decade!) on [adult swim] (and, later, the revived Toonami block, which aired The Final Act from 2014-2015), becoming one of the first big hits for the block, and the series is now considered a classic gateway anime series for many in the US.

In May 2020 it was announced the series would be getting an anime sequel titled Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon with the main characters being half-demon twins Towa and Setsuna, the daughters of Sesshomaru, alongside Moroha, the daughter of Inuyasha and Kagome.

For spinoff series and video games, see Inuyasha.

Inuyasha provides examples of:

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