To Your Eternity has taken the world by storm with its heart-wrenching plot and precious characters that secured it the Crunchyroll Anime Award of Best Drama in 2022. The main character, Fushi, is a being of incredible power whose story involves him learning from and interacting with others in order to fulfill his purpose of experiencing the world. But what exactly can this mysterious protagonist do?
The Beholder, Fushi's creator, states that he sent Fushi out into the world in order to preserve it and become more human. When viewers first meet him, Fushi doesn't understand anything about being alive, and he is constantly getting himself killed out of sheer ignorance. The Beholder states that even death is a worthwhile stimulant, so viewers end up watching him learn the hard way via starvation or falling from great heights. It is through the people he encounters that Fushi learns how to speak, read, write, and cook. By interacting with different people, Fushi eventually evolves from learning how to survive to learning about things like grief and family, with his powers standing as a reflection of this.
Powers of Creation
Fushi is not human. He was created by the Beholder and started off as just a small orb that rested by some rocks where he stayed for who knows how many years. Eventually, he was able to shift into a dog after coming in contact with it. These shape-shifting abilities rely on Fushi's experience; given enough stimuli, he can create just about anything.
Fushi has rubbed fruit and arrows against his skin and been able to craft them from nothing. This is especially helpful in combat when Fushi can produce sword after sword and arrow after arrow. Later in the story, he is able to develop this into entire buildings, ships, and kingdoms. If he chooses, Fushi can remain connected to anything he creates, keeping it part of himself. He eventually uses his powers to connect with the entire planet through an extensive root system, meaning the entire world becomes Fushi. This allows him to teleport anywhere on the earth and be aware of things from great distances. But to even get to that point, he still needs to understand what he's creating, usually physically touching it or spending time with it.
Shape-shifting into living creatures, like people or animals, requires a little more finesse. The most important requirement in Fushi's shape-shifting is that in order to turn into another person or animal, they have to be dead. Fushi was only able to shift into the dog and the Nameless boy after they both died. Fushi only learned about Parona's and Gugu's deaths because he was able to shift into them. His shifts share whatever state those people died in which is why he retains the injuries the Nameless Boy and March suffered. Fushi, essentially, picks up where his dead friends left off.
He can assume the skills and attributes of his different forms such as Parona's fighting prowess, Gugu's ability to spit fire, and Prince Bon's ability to see ghosts. It is discovered later that this ability to create his friends' bodies leads to some incredibly fortunate circumstances down the road. If Fushi's friends choose to not move on, they stick around as ghosts, and if Fushi creates their body, they can live again. He essentially can create an immortal fellowship of all those still with him, giving them a new beating heart every time theirs stops.
This leads to the ability that makes him famous: his immortality which is all in his name. March dubbed him Fushi, "不死", as in immortality. Fushi cannot seem to be killed, and even if he suffers major injuries, he is able to heal completely given enough time, regenerating at a rate that anyone would be impressed by. This ability seems to grow in strength as time goes on, leading to even speedier recoveries. He does not physically age unless he stays in one form for a certain amount of time. While staying with Gugu, Fushi didn't shift out of the Nameless Boy's form for years and could be seen growing older into an adult. Once he shifts to someone else, however, he returns to the age they died.
Power of Empathy
The Beholder's desire to develop Fushi as a person is personified by his last skill, his empathy. Fushi can feel the pain of anything around him, including people and animals. He would notably let Gugu kill the crayfish before serving them for dinner because he could feel every one of them die. This skill seems to be the grounds in which Fushi's purpose is fashioned and where his greatest weakness lies.
Since Fushi exists to experience the world, empathize with it, and preserve it to a certain degree, his enemies, the Nokkers, seek to strip him of everything he's gained. If Fushi is attacked by a Nokker, it can steal his ability to shape-shift. Not only does that mean he cannot access his full range of abilities, but he forgets everything he learned and experienced in gaining that form. If he is in Tonari's form when fighting, the Nokkers can steal the very memory of her from Fushi, leaving a blank in his mind, and they can keep doing this until there is absolutely nothing left, reducing Fushi back to the orb he started out as.
With these beings as his enemies, Fushi's story becomes one of desperately trying to hold on to the people he has come to love even after they've died. He is constantly trying to recreate his world, preserve it, and resurrect those who used to occupy it. Fushi's abilities function as a way of expressing the themes found in To Your Eternity. That it is those around us who shape who we are and how we see this world. It focuses on the human desire to understand and connect in the most blatant metaphors of shape-shifting, immortality, and resurrection.