Nadeko Sengoku

Overview

Summary

Gallery

"Nadeko is someone else as far as 'I' go-which is why Nadeko never calls herself 'me'. I'm not the person everyone takes to be Nadeko Sengoku - if they think Nadeko Sengoku is cute, they're not talking about me."

— Nadeko Sengoku

Nadeko Sengoku
Kanji Name	千石 撫子
Kana Name	せんごく なでこ
Romaji Name	Sengoku Nadeko
Character Information
Alias	Nadeshiko Sengoku Kuchinawa
Age	14
Gender	Female
Personal Status
Classification	Human Aberration (God)
Status	Alive
Relatives	Sengoku Couple (Parents)
Abilities	Drawing Skills
Professional Status
Occupation	Student Class President Manga Artist (later)
Affiliation	Nanahyakuichi Middle School North Shirahebi Shrine
Media
Work of Origin	Monogatari Series
Novel Debut	Bakemonogatari (Part Two)
Anime Debut	Bakemonogatari Episode 9
Manga Debut	Bakemonogatari Vol. 6, Chapter 45 Seishun Kijinden! 240 Gakuen Vol. 2, Chapter 9
Voice Actor	Kana Hanazawa

Appearances
Novel Appearances
Series	Monogatari Series
Volumes	Bakemonogatari (Part Two) Nisemonogatari (Part One) Otorimonogatari Koimonogatari Koyomimonogatari Owarimonogatari (Part One) Owarimonogatari (Part Three) Zoku Owarimonogatari Orokamonogatari Nademonogatari Musubimonogatari Amarimonogatari Ougimonogatari
Anime Appearances
Series	Bakemonogatari Nisemonogatari Monogatari Series Second Season Owarimonogatari Koyomimonogatari Owarimonogatari Season Two Zoku Owarimonogatari
Episodes	Bakemonogatari Episode 9, 10, Bakemonogatari Episode 11 Nisemonogatari Episode 2 Monogatari Series Second Season Episode 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 22, 25, 26, 13 Owarimonogatari Episode 3 Owarimonogatari Season Two Episode 6 Zoku Owarimonogatari Episode 2, 3, 4, 5
Manga Appearances
Series	Bakemonogatari Seishun Kijinden! 240 Gakuen
Volumes	Bakemonogatari Vol. 6, 7 Seishun Kijinden! 240 Gakuen Vol. 2, 3

Nadeko Sengoku (千石(せんごく) 撫子(なでこ), Sengoku Nadeko), later known by the pseudonym Nadeshiko Sengoku (千石(せんごく) 撫子(なでしこ), Sengoku Nadeshiko), is a supporting character and later antagonist of the Monogatari Series. She is a childhood friend of Tsukihi Araragi and Koyomi Araragi, who was given the curse of the Jagirinawa by Sunshi Sajou and Nakuna, and later becomes a temporary god of North Shirahebi Shrine.

Personality

Nadeko presents herself to be just a shy, meek, ordinary young girl. Constantly nervous in front of other people, she often hides her eyes using her bangs, and tends to avoid interaction with people she isn't close to, even running away in the middle of a conversation with Koyomi when she saw Tsubasa Hanekawa approaching. She becomes a little more confident around her friends, such as Koyomi or Tsukihi. In these instances, she can often be found making references to old manga series from the 80s, which she has a passion for. She is also prone to laughter, finding Koyomi and Suruga Kanbaru's antics amusing. She has a crush on Koyomi, which has, in random bouts of confidence, driven her to dress more provacatively around Koyomi with the intention of enticing him.

Nadeko has a victim complex - subconsciously diverting criticism and responsibility for her actions by laying the blame elsewhere, avoiding having to confront herself. Her first encounter with an Aberration is different from other incidents, in which at least part of the blame always traces back to the possessed person's mental state. In this case, her own actions in attempting to cancel out a phony curse threatned upon her by a classmate caused an actual curse to appear, causing her harm. However, as both Ougi Oshino and Shinobu Oshino explained to her, victims cannot remain victims forever, a fact that becomes apparent in the incident set up by Ougi with Nadeko as its center. In a desperate attempt to avoid confronting her inner anxieties, guilt, and dwindling self worth, Nadeko deludes even herself, hallucinating the deceased serpent god Kuchinawa, who in reality is her extreme inner critic and subconscious. Nadeko subconsciously fabricates a narrative in which the god forces her to enact the events leading up to her enshrinement at North Shirahebi shrine.

Nadeko is considered to be cute by most people she knows, in both appearance and personality. This is revealed to be a major factor that lead to a total lack of self confidence and self worth, her image as a "shy, cute girl" having been built up in part by her parents, who only possess a surface level understand of their daughter, and in part by herself, using it as a shield. Nadeko is terrified of opening up to others and desires nothing more than to hide herself and remain unnoticed by others. In a conversation with Deishuu Kaiki, Hanekawa describes Nadeko as someone who "snubs others out", never really letting anyone truly know her. She can maintain a sense of security by never opening up to others; however, this also means that she does not truly trust anyone, and she will never feel truly fulfilled. This desire for comfort can also be seen in her longstanding crush for Koyomi; by being in love with someone who is already in a relationship of his own, Nadeko can tune out any other romantic propositions from the outside, including her classmate Sunshi's, while never having to feel the pain of rejection, as she is already aware from the onset how her feelings will never be requited. Internally, Koyomi's presence in her life helps her feel loved by having someone to worry and help her when she's suffering. By having someone save her when she falls, she can avoid ever having to grow stronger.

Her quiet, shy demeanor first begins to crumble as her friend Tsukihi snips her bangs off and she is confronted by her school teacher, Sasayabu, about her assignment as class president to improve the class's dwindling morale and inquire about her progress. Without her bangs hiding her line of sight, she's unable to shift her gaze downwards to wait for the other party to give up and move on to avoid giving a straight answer - instead, Sasayabu is simply confused as she stares at the floor without a response. Having been previously slammed by Ougi, Shinobu, and Tsukihi for her flaws, her sense of self shattering as she struggles to cope with herself, further questioning from the teacher causes her to fly into rage, screaming at both her teacher about his assignment and at the class for their behavior, pouring out her true feelings for the first time in her life. As her ranting continues - it's soon clear that, rather than the target of her rant being her class - really, it's all about herself and screaming out her scathing self loathing as these prior intense encounters have left her seeing herself as nothing but a pure, rotten liar.

Kuchinawa urges a mentally unstable Nadeko to eat the Talisman in return for getting her forelocks back, as well as her wish of having her love with Koyomi be requited. However, Koyomi catches her in the act and cautions her to put the talisman down. Provoked and taunted by Shinobu, in the heat of the moment she eats the talisman and ends up becoming an oddity. By becoming an all-powerful force, Nadeko can ignore the human troubles that lie at her heart and remain in a state of eternal empty happiness. She decides to murder Koyomi, the target of her affection, as an extreme method to cement him as a figure of unrequited love, who she can continue to pine for without any anxiety over being rejected.

However, her innermost depths are only revealed after Kaiki exposes her most well kept secret, the one true wish that she had never shown anyone else before: her desire to become a manga artist. Her manga, which she'd been secretly creating for years, hiding in a closet that she forbade anyone from looking into, are the only outlet for her true feelings and emotions. Because of that, they are wholly incompatible with her facade; truly pursuing this passion would mean letting people see into her heart, unprotected by all the barriers she puts up, something she was too terrified to do. However, with some encouragement from Kaiki, the one man who managed to truly figure her out, she agreed to give up on godhood, and to pursue her real dream, forgoing all of her shields, including her dependence on Koyomi, parting ways with him for good. After the whole incident, Nadeko became much more comfortable with herself. She decided to give it her best to become a manga artist and no longer tried to hide it from anyone. She remained friends with Tsukihi, and stopped hiding behind her bangs or her cute exterior.

In the 'mirror world', Nadeko takes on the personality of Kuchinawa as her own, becoming crude and arrogant and adopting his speech patterns, using the masculine, pompous pronoun of ore-sama, the snake-like laugh and the provocative grunts.

In the novels, she commonly refers to herself in the first person, often considered a child-like tendency in Japanese. In combination with this, she also uses a lower case "i" as her first person pronoun in the English novels to emphasize her childish way of speaking. She often spells words incorrectly, and has a simplistic vocabulary - indicating her emotional and learning growth may have been somewhat stunted due to her sheltered childhood. She often likes to create puns with her name.

Appearance

Nadeko is a young girl with brown eyes (purple in the manga) and shoulder-length brown hair, with long bangs that cover her eyes, which she later cuts into a very short haircut that no longer features the bangs. While in her goldy state, her hair is made entirely of extremely thin, white snakes, and her eyes are bright red. She is shown wearing baggy, unfashionable clothing , such as an outfit consisting of a puffy orange hat and an orange coat worn over the shoulders, over a pink blouse with ribbons, as well as a pair of baggy blue jeans and brown boots. Other variations of this similar outfit include a red baseball cap or beanie and a pink coat worn over blue overalls, with the same pair of brown shoes. She is also shown wearing the Nanahyakuichi Middle School uniform, consisting of a beige and brown one piece sailor uniform with a red ribbon. After getting her haircut, Nadeko is shown wearing a red tracksuit.

Background

Nadeko was born to a pair of regular, law-abiding citizens, and was pampered and treated as "cute" ever since childhood. Her father says that she never went through any kind of rebellious phase, always remaining obedient. Back in elementary school, Nadeko didn't have many friends, the only person close to her being Tsukihi Araragi, who often invited the girl to her house to play. There, she met Koyomi, who she quickly developed a crush for. Gradually, the two friends lost contact, but Nadeko maintained her affection towards the boy she met there. Later, during her middle school years at Nanahyakuichi Middle School, Sunshi Sajou confessed his love to her, but Nadeko rejected him, saying she was already interested in someone else. This upset not only her classmate, Nakuna, but also Sunshi himself, who both independently decided to curse Nadeko with the Jagirinawa, using fake knowledge gained from Deishuu Kaiki, the conman. Normally, this wouldn't have had any effect, but Nadeko, paranoid, looked into the curse and found out a ritual to remove it that involved sacrificing snakes. This, however, was incomplete aberration knowledge, having no positive effect, and because she decided to conduct the sacrifices on the soil of North Shirahebi Shrine, an air pocket of aberration energy, the actual effects of the curses began to manifest, restraining her body and threatening her life.

Abilities and Equipment

• Drawing Skills: Nadeko is quite proficient at drawing, having practiced for a long time by herself, and Kaiki, someone who is himself able to draw, comments that she might be quite talented. Her skills are later proven to be good enough to earn her a career as a manga artist with three serialized works.
• Divine Powers: After ingesting the talisman of the snake god Kuchinawa, Nadeko gains power beyond human capabilities. She is shown to be able to control the snakes that make up her hair, extending them at will and using them to attack her opponents, poisoning them as well. She has also been shown to be able to rip out snakes from her hair and transform them into solid spears, stabbing others with them. She is said to be so powerful that she can destroy the entirety of Naoetsu Town by herself if she wishes.

Quotes

• (Nadeko deciding to murder Koyomi) "If I mean to have an unrequited love, it'd be a lot more romantic if he were dead."

Trivia

• Nadeko's last name, Sengoku, means "thousand stones", and is phonetically identical to the name of the Sengoku period (戦国(せんごく), Sengoku), a period of constant civil war in the history of Japan.
• Nadeko's first name, when pronounced as Nadeshiko, means "Dianthus flower", and can also mean "caressable girl", a word denoting an ideal woman by Japanese standards.
• In the official guidebook, series author Nisio Isin did an interview with all of the voice actors, and asked Kana Hanazawa what character she would like to play, in which she replied that she'd like to play an evil character, possibly becoming the inspiration for the Nadeko Medusa arc.
• According to her monologue at the beginning of Otorimonogatari, Nadeko's favorite foods are Salisbury steak and yakisoba, her favorite manga are from the 80s, her favorite game genre is retro, her favorite music genre is folk songs and her favorite color is purple.