Kaguya Ōtsutsuki

**Kaguya Ōtsutsuki** (大筒木カグヤ, *Ōtsutsuki Kaguya*) was a member of the Ōtsutsuki Clan and the matriarch of a branch family of her clan, including her children Hagoromo and Hamura. Long before the founding of the hidden villages, during an era of endless war, Kaguya consumed the fruit of the God Tree and became the first wielder of chakra on Earth, before later merging with the tree to become the Ten-Tails.

## Background

A millennium ago, Kaguya and Isshiki were both sent to cultivate a God Tree on the planet Earth and harvest its Chakra Fruit, with which she was to provide for the main family of her clan from another world. According to Amado Sanzu, Kaguya was a low-ranking member of the clan chosen as a sacrifice to the Ten-Tails, which would nurture the development of the God Tree. Instead, Kaguya desired the chakra fruit herself; betraying Isshiki in the process and leaving him for dead.

In the anime, Kaguya was discovered by the people of the Land of Ancestors during an arrival to Earth, who brought her before their emperor Tenji. Identifying herself as the God Tree's guardian, Kaguya used her abilities to wipe Tenji's memories of the encounter and subsequently settled among his people, becoming recognised as his concubine. Living among humans, she slowly developed an attachment for the planet she meant to destroy. Growing closer with the emperor, she eventually fell pregnant. When the Land of That began to threaten the Land of Ancestors over a border dispute, Tenji attempted to prevent the outbreak of war by declaring that anyone who attacked the larger nation's representatives was to be executed, an order which she broke when she was threatened by them, resulting in her and her assistant Aino becoming hunted by their land to be executed.

Losing all faith in humanity but still longing for peace, Kaguya believed that it was necessary for her to attain god-like powers in order to put an end to all of humanity's conflicts. So, despite her clan waiting to harvest that world of its God Tree, she defied the taboo surrounding the fruit and ate it. In doing so, she awakened the Rinne Sharingan and became the sole person on the planet endowed with chakra. Using her new-found power, Kaguya single-handedly ended the wars, and took control of the nations. For her deed of stopping the conflict, she received the blessing of the people and was worshipped as the Rabbit Goddess (卯の女神, *Usagi no Megami*). After establishing peace and changing somehow, Kaguya used the Infinite Tsukuyomi on humans to transform them into an army of White Zetsu over the course of many years in fear of her clan returning to take her chakra away. In the anime, not wanting mankind to perish, she freed some victims of the genjutsu and erased their memories.

While giving birth to her twin sons Hagoromo and Hamura, she dispersed chakra to them, making the pair the first people born with chakra. Ruling by herself and often resorting to cruelty, her dōjutsu and jutsu were regarded with fear, awe and reverence by humans. At some indefinite point, the Rabbit Goddess had instead become known as a Demon (鬼, *Oni*). Eventually, Kaguya found herself ruled by her own desire to possess all chakra, which eventually turned her against her sons. Having devised a plan to absorb their chakra, she integrated with the God Tree and became the Ten-Tails itself, followed by her challenging the twins to battle.

Assuming the Ten-Tails was an incarnation of the God Tree that attacked them to recover the chakra from its stolen fruit, Hagoromo and Hamura sealed the beast's chakra within the former's body while using its husk as the core of Six Paths — Chibaku Tensei, creating a celestial body that would become known as the Moon. Hamura later took leadership of the Ōtsutsuki clan and departed to the moon to guard the beast's remains, while Hagoromo remained on Earth in order to spread chakra to humanity and teach them the concept of ninshū. However, just before her sons could completely seal her, Kaguya had manifested her will in the form of an artificial human called Black Zetsu. With the agenda of reviving its "*mother*", Black Zetsu manipulated Hagoromo's eldest son, Indra, as well as his descendants within the Uchiha clan and his brother's descendants within the Senju clan in an attempt to get one of them to awaken the Rinnegan and break the seal. Madara Uchiha would eventually succeed in obtaining the Rinnegan, and Black Zetsu began secretly manipulating world events to have Kaguya revived.

## Personality

As noted by her son Hagoromo, Kaguya was once truly a good and caring person. This was expanded on in the anime where despite displaying an apathetic personality, she longed for peace and eventually fell in love with Tenji, who shared a similar dream, even though she never openly displayed her feelings for him. She also cared deeply for her hand-maiden Aino, even though she never openly displayed emotions to her either until just before Aino's death. However, she was also treacherous and ruthless towards those she did not care about, as she betrayed fellow clansman Isshiki and nearly killed him; Amado speculated it could either be personal enmity or her desire to have the chakra fruit for herself.

After obtaining the ability to manipulate powerful chakra from the God Tree's fruit, Kaguya had grown despotic and developed both a god-complex and messiah-complex, believing that chakra rightfully belonged to her alone and that only she could protect and unite the world. Black Zetsu noted that Kaguya tried to love humans for the sake of peace, but her distrust in them proved far too great as she came to believe all they did was fight and destroy the world. Despite her initial desire for peace like her sons, grandsons, and in the anime, her lover, Kaguya ultimately caved into corruption from her power and lost faith in humanity's ability to do what is right. As a result of her losing faith in humanity, Kaguya opted to use her great and terrible power to submit everyone to her will. As Hagoromo noted, humanity around that time began to fear her as a demon. She uses the archaic pronoun "warawa" (ワラワ) when referring to herself — a sign of ancient nobility.

Kaguya also displays a degree of affection, as she appears to care very deeply about the Earth, viewing it as a nursery that she does not want humanity itself to damage any further. In the anime, although she had affection for her lover, Tenji, it was not strong enough to stop her from trapping him in the Infinite Tsukuyomi when he betrayed her for his own pursuit of peace. Although she openly stated that she hated her own sons for using their inherited chakra against her and created the Ten-Tails to take it back by force, she openly wept when looking at Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke Uchiha, who reminded her of them, hinting that part of her still loved her sons.

In the anime, Hagoromo and Hamura understood that their mother committed immoral acts for the sake of protecting them from the clan that she previously defected from, and they still felt affection for her because she was simply a mother doing what she could for her children. Even Kaguya herself told her sons prior to their battle that she had given them nothing but unconditional nurturing and protection, and willingly shared her chakra with them before their betrayal prompted her to try to claim it back. However, whatever love she harboured for her children was small, as shown in the anime where she was willing to take Hamura hostage and force him to fight Hagoromo in order to reclaim her chakra. Although, Kaguya did claim Hagoromo's love would prevent him from killing Hamura, suggesting she wanted to claim her chakra back without killing her children. It was later revealed she was on a mission to provide chakra to her clan, but after falling in love with a human and bearing his children, she created a White Zetsu Army to fight them off and protect not only her children, but the inhabitants of the Earth. This suggests that had it not been for her clan, she would have been a benevolent ruler.

While her belief that chakra should belong to her alone made her somewhat obsessive in retrieving it from everyone else, she is willing to listen to Black Zetsu's suggestion on killing Naruto to prevent him and Sasuke from sealing her away, though she expressed reluctance that she must destroy a large reservoir of chakra to preserve her freedom.

Despite her sombreness, Kaguya can nonetheless be stunned by unexpected events, as one of Naruto's perverted ninjutsu caught her off-guard, thereby allowing him to land a hit on her.

Naruto stated that unlike all his previous foes, he couldn't empathise with Kaguya at all, as he felt she completely lacked a heart. Hagoromo wasn't sure why Kaguya ended up the way she did, but believed her eating the chakra fruit may have had something to do with it.