Sandbox / Edens Zero Poseidon Shura

Main Character Index
Crew of Edens Zero (Shiki Granbell, Shiki's Companions) | Crew of Edens One (Ziggy)
Oración Seis Galáctica (Associates [Poseidon Shura]) | Interstellar Union Army
Grand Shiki Cosmos (Sakura Cosmos) | Others
The Final World

Spoilers for the first 113 chapters are unmarked; for comparison, the anime adaptation covers up to Chapter 68. You Have Been Warned!

Poseidon Shura

Poseidon Shura

Voiced by: Kenichi Suzumura (Japanese)

"Don't get it twisted. Women are a Glee a dozen. And everything in this cosmos belongs to me."

The adopted human son and imperial heir of Poseidon Nero. Much like Shiki, Shura is a Satan Gravity user who prefers to manipulate the gravity of objects, turning anything around him into a weapon. Due to his lonely and unloving upbringing under his father, however, Shura is also a cruel, wild, and violently insane deadbeat, turning him into one of Shiki's most hated enemies.

---

• 0% Approval Rating:
  • Shura is so universally hated by the people of Aoi that public opinion for the Empire tanks to record lows once Nero puts him in charge of dealing with the robot uprising. This is to say nothing of his subordinates, who only follow him out of fear, and promptly abandon him when things take a hairy turn. Subverted when Ijuna remains the one person in the universe to remain by his side after falling in love with him.
  • During the final arcs, this trope is shown to be downplayed with Universe Zero's Shura, who has a better reputation as a Benevolent Dictator after becoming Emperor, but is still dismissed as an Inadequate Inheritor to Nero by some of his subjects. Once he dedicates himself to cleaning up Nero's messes by turning The Empire into The Republic, his approval ratings skyrocket.
• Absolute Xenophobe: He takes Fantastic Racism against robots and androids to its furthest extreme by ordering the genocide of every living machine in the Aoi Cosmos, using the war against Ziggy as a front to exterminate what he considers to be an inferior race.
• Adopted into Royalty: Nero took the human Shura on as his son and heir according to the will of his Empire Dice.
• Adoption Angst: He despises his adoptive father, who never showed him any love, which motivates Shura to plot Nero's assassination to get him out of his hair for good. His Universe Zero self has no such qualms, seeing his father as a misguided but well-meaning ruler whose shoes he feels responsible to fill.
• Always Someone Better: Shura is built up as someone more powerful than Shiki, having a natural talent for gravity that he practically trained himself from scratch, and boasting a fine balance of skill and strength that Shiki lacks. This becomes a non-factor by the time they actually meet, which comes after Xenolith puts Shiki through roughly 35 days worth of training in one week to level the playing field.
• Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: He fancies himself as the "king of gravity" due to his raw power and natural aptitude for Gravity Ether Gear, even though his only formal training in the Magimech Arts was from a single session as a child under Ziggy. Besides that, his fighting style mainly consists of simply lifting and crushing things, and he lacks the Semantic Superpower that users of "true" gravity have.
• Ax-Crazy: Shura is a violently unstable fellow prone to acts of extreme violence and graphic homicide over seemingly trivial details.
• Bad Boss: Shura is a horrendous leader who treats the Imperial army the same way he treats anybody else: by turning them into bloody paste when they rub him the wrong way or don't follow his orders.
• Benevolent Boss: As shown in the final arcs, Shura is a much more compassionate leader in Universe Zero than the Bad Boss she was before the Cosmic Retcon, viewing the Oceans 6 and Ijuna as his trusted companions.
• Benevolent Dictator: Shura behaves like one in Universe Zero, where he succeeds Nero as The Emperor. Rather than the depraved tyrant the Edens Zero crew expects him to be, he's a genuinely well-meaning ruler who's helped bring the Empire to prosperity, but nearly makes the same rash decisions he made in the old world in response to the Foresta crisis, which would permanently tarnish his reputation as a leader if not for Shiki's intervention.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Given his strength, connections to Ziggy, and personal animosity with Shiki, he certainly seems poised to become a major antagonist moving forward. In the end, he's so Out-Gambitted by Nero that his plans to achieve power were All for Nothing from the start.
• Blood Knight: Shura is such a bloodthirsty maniac that he becomes ecstatic when Shiki shows he's good enough to keep up with him in a fight, asking to be his friend on the spot. Even after Shiki gets on his bad side, Shura would rather keep fighting him just to prolong Shiki's suffering, and is let down when Shiki pushes him into making their battle into "a boring old fight to the death" by going into Overdrive.
• Card-Carrying Villain: He's very well aware of what a black-hearted monster he is, and he relishes that fact at every opportunity with a mile-wide grin, something he throws in Shiki's face when getting lectured over the weight of people's lives.
• The Casanova: Taken to horrifying extremes. He describes women as "a Glee a dozen", but once he grows tired of two of the girls clinging to him, he doesn't simply ditch them, but murders them to set an example.
• Character Tics: He has a tendency to puff his cheeks when he's belting out an Evil Laugh or indulging in some Evil Gloating.
• Delinquent Hair: He has messy green hair that's shaved on the right side of his head to show what an irresponsible deadbeat of a son he is.
• Dragon-in-Chief: Shura serves this role in the Nero 66 arc, where he's left in charge of the Empire's entire military force for the Aoi War while Nero sits on his throne in accordance to the Empire Dice's will to not interfere, and winds up being the most central and active threat the Edens Zero crew faces. Subverted when Nero reveals that Shura was dancing in the palm of his hand the entire time, as the Emperor turns his son's assassination plot against him on its head right as Shura tries carrying it out.
• Drunk on the Dark Side: Because he Used to Be a Sweet Kid, it's implied that Shura's monstrous and extravagant behavior is a result of his heart falling into dark gravity, likely as a result of being driven mad by a lifetime of emotional neglect.
• The Emperor: Universe Zero's Shura succeeds Nero as ruler of the Empire, but unlike the Evil Overlord his original self would have become, this Shura is a Benevolent Dictator. He ceases to be this when he abolishes the Empire and forms the Aoi Cosmos Republic.
• Evil Counterpart: Serves as one to Shiki, his exact opposite in many regards besides being a fellow Gravity Master trained by Ziggy and an adopted child under a non-human (grand)father. Shiki is compassionate, uses his gravity to protect and spread joy to his friends, and values lives of everyone whether they're human, machine, good, or evil; on the other hand, Shura is cruel, enjoys figuratively and literally crushing anyone who stands in his way, and values nobody's lives outside his own, least of all the lives of "worthless" things like robots.
• Evil Laugh: He often breaks out into childish cackling, being the gleeful and proud villain that he is.
• Evil Is Petty: As a villain, he takes just about any excuse he can to squash lives and get what he wants, no matter how insignificant. This ranges from killing a general just for calling Ijuna his "consort", to physically and emotionally tormenting Shiki for not wanting to be his friend.
• The Evil Prince: As Nero's only son and heir, Shura wants to inherit the throne as soon as possible, which he tries by baiting Nero into a death match with Ziggy, all so Shura can officially claim everything in the Aoi Cosmos as his own.
• Fatal Flaw: Pride is the worst of his many, many character flaws, as he's so self-assured of his own power, brilliance, and superiority to everyone that he doesn't even entertain the possibility of failure. Nero winds up seeing Shura's treachery to a mile away because of this, and completely undermines his plan to use his own Antimatter bombs against him by sending them all back to Shura before he has the chance to detonate them.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: He lives in an age where Casual Interstellar Travel is a part of everyday life, and he himself boasts superhuman powers from a bygone era, yet he scoffs at the idea that Nero's dice are magical Relics that grant him absolute victory.
• For the Evulz: There's no rhyme or reason behind his desire for carnage and absolute control; he simply has all the power and privilege in the cosmos to take whatever he wants, so he takes it.
• Gravity Master: His "Demon King" Ether gives him access to the same gravity powers as Shiki and Ziggy, which he uses in a manner more similar to telekinesis by lifting a derelict spaceship out of the ground, ripping individual pieces off a machine, controlling cables and wires like rope to restrain targets, and crunching a boulder into a javelin. He also uses far more brutal methods on people, such as "dropping" people onto the ceiling, crushing them into bloody pulps, and plucking Shiki's eye right out of its socket.
• Guyliner: He wears black eyeliner resembling streams of tears, which he's had even since he was a child.
• Hate Sink: He is written to be so repulsively evil, being a psychotic and power-hungry prince who carries out grotesque acts of violence far beyond Mashima's usual standards, that it makes even an All-Loving Hero like Shiki refuse to be his friend. This gets downplayed in his death scene, which humanizes him by showing how pitifully lonely and starved for affection he really is.
• Hated by All: Shura stands as one of the most despised characters in-universe. His father has zero affection for him, his subjects think he's an incompetent buffoon, his minions' reactions to working for him range from indifference to outrage to fearful obedience, and Shiki has sworn to never, ever be his friend. Even the one who has shown him any love and sympathy, Ijuna, only does so because she's under a delusion induced by her own Ether Gear. In the end, Ijuna's genuine affection for him after being freed from her Ether Gear's influence subverts this.
• The Heavy: Though Nero is the villain in charge of The Empire that the Edens Zero crew battle in the Aoi Cosmos saga, Shura is the one who spearheads the saga's climactic Aoi War and gets the more personal interaction with Shiki, while Nero spends most of the action sitting on his throne and never meeting the crew face-to-face.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • During the Nero 66 arc, this is subverted, as he dies right as he's finally humanized by Ijuna's love for him, making this a Heel–Face Door-Slam.
  • Following the Lendard arc, this is played straight thanks to the Cosmic Retcon, which brings him Back from the Dead and radically alters his past to the point where he never becomes a villain to begin with.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: When he's not being a Walking Shirtless Scene, he's wearing a shirtless leather jacket with pants.
• Humanizing Tears: After spending all his time acting like a cruel and black-hearted monster, Shura undergoes a tearful Villainous BSoD when Ijuna concludes that Shura's love for her is genuine and accepts her own love for him without her self-brainwashing, which she asserts is proof that he has a human heart.
• Hypocrite: He calls Shiki a hypocrite for hesitating to accept Shura's friendship over their clashing beliefs, but then tries to convince Shiki into abandoning his ideals that Androids Are People, Too, which ensures that Shiki turns him down.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: He dealt with soul-crushing loneliness since he was a child, unloved by his own father and having nobody else to love, which eventually drove him to madness. It's all but stated that he still craves some form of affection from somebody, but realizes his chances of that happening are impossible because of his lust for power and penchant for senseless carnage. When Ijuna falls in love with him despite it all, he's reduced to tears over getting the kind of love he thought a man like himself could never have.
• Improvised Weapon: Using his Gravity Ether Gear, Shura can use just about any object around him as a weapon. He uses this to his advantage when fighting in the ash fields of Nero 66, which are littered with crashed ships and ammunition he can fling at Shiki, at one point breaking a missile down into individual pieces for an increase in ammunition.
• In Love with the Mark: Inverted with regards to Universe Zero's Shura, who was originally spied on by his world's Ijuna, but fell in love with her despite fully knowing her intentions. However, Ijuna eventually reciprocated his feelings, and they became engaged.
• Interspecies Adoption: Shura is a human who was adopted by an alien with obvious fish man features like tentacle Alien Hair.
• Just a Machine: He sees no value in the lives of androids, which he proudly and repeatedly demonstrates by sentencing all robots in his cosmos to death, programming a battalion of Robot Soldiers to perform a suicide attack on Shiki against their wills, and referring to Witch as an "it" while putting her through Cold-Blooded Torture.
• Lack of Empathy: By his own admission, he's the kind of person who takes the value of every person's life very lightly, unless that life is his own. It's for this reason that he's able to slaughter people at the drop of a hat.
• Ladykiller in Love: Taken more literally than usual, since he actually kills the women he's tired of, but it counts towards Ijuna, who started out as just one of many women he'd take to his torture chamber to have his way with. At some point, Shura started to develop feelings for her, but brushed it off as an effect of Ijuna's Ether Gear, which causes people to fall in love. He finally has a Love Epiphany when Ijuna reveals her power doesn't work on someone who's never loved or been loved by anyone before, proving that even a monster like him is capable of loving someone else.
• Laughing Mad: One of the many signs of his mental instability is his tendency to cackle like a maniac when killing or insulting others.
• Lima Syndrome: Shura thinks that he's only taken a liking to Ijuna—the woman he tortured and humiliated in every way possible—because her Ether Gear causes people to fall in love. However, in their final moments, Ijuna reveals that her Ether Gear shouldn't have worked on Shura because he'd never known love before, proving that whatever feelings he had for her were genuine.
• Mad Eye: From the point of his introduction, he can hardly go a scene without one of his eyes bulging to show what an unstable madman he is.
• Maou the Demon King: Though Shura doesn't use the title himself, his Ether is classified as the "Demon King" type, which gives him gravity powers.
• Mask of Sanity: He's known to be a brutally violent and deeply disturbed man from the get go, but when he's in front of his father and the general populace, he keeps up the appearance of a respectful son and a charismatic politician.
• Meaningful Name: "Shura" is the Japanese name of the Hindu demigod of war. It can also refer to someone who is in a situation where they must fight endlessly in a relentless and inhuman manner, which matches Shura's personality to a T.
• The Most Wanted: Although he's the adoptive son of one of the Oración Seis Galáctica, who are this by default, Nero is so old that the Interstellar Union Army fears Shura's ascension to the throne far more than anything the Emperor can do, and thereby prioritizes Shura's elimination above all else in the Aoi War.
• Not Good with Rejection: He proves himself this in a platonic sense when Shura requests Shiki to be his friend so they can team up against Ziggy. Shiki rejects him for being a genocidal, robot-hating bigot who refuses to change his ways, which Shura sees as due cause to thrash the Shining Stars and kidnap Witch just to get back at him.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • Shura promotes himself as a Well-Intentioned Extremist with his plans to wipe out all robots in the Aoi Cosmos with the All-Link System, which he publicly declares is the only way to stop Ziggy's conquest. In private, he admits he just hates robots and was looking for an excuse to destroy them all.
  • In the final arcs, this trope is featured as a subversion with his Universe Zero self, who carries out the same plan from a genuine desire to stop the supposedly renegade Xenolith, and sees the plan itself as Dirty Business.
• One True Love: Ijuna insists that Shura is her predestined love bound to her by the Red String of Fate, even though he's an utter monster who's never known love or how to love others in his entire life. In a twist, this is played straight: Shura developed Lima Syndrome over the days he spent torturing Ijuna, who had Stockholm Syndrome for him, triggering her Ether Gear ability that brainwashed her into loving him in the first place. Ijuna's discovery of this causes her to embrace her feelings for him, and they spend their final moments Together in Death.
• One-Winged Angel: Shura's Overdrive form gives him various aquatic attributes, most notably Nero's Tentacle Hair and fish-like scales around his legs, which leaves him far more inhuman-looking.
• Overlord Jr.: His father is The Emperor of the Aoi Cosmos, yet Shura is far worse: while Nero has a superficially noble desire to protect humankind, Shura feels entitled to owning everything in the cosmos, including people.
• Pimped-Out Cape: Universe Zero's Shura wears an extravagant, regal cape with a fur collar to highlight his status as The Emperor.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: From the moment he's introduced, she's shown to be a massive sexist who treats women as objects, comes up with sickening ways to humiliate and torture them, and murders them without batting an eye when they rub him the wrong way. He's also one of the most bigoted characters towards robots and androids in the series, targeting them specifically because he feels they're worthless. His kidnapping of Witch combines these vices by having him grope her while calling her Shiki's "toy".
• Practically Joker: He has a lot in common with The Joker: he has green hair, he's Ax-Crazy, he murders people For the Evulz, he laughs at death and mayhem, and he becomes fixated on making The Hero suffer for refusing his friendship. Some parts of his design look like they come straight from Jared Leto's portrayal, namely the punk hairstyle, makeup, and body tattoos. He also has a victim-turned-sidekick who's fallen madly in love with him akin to Harley Quinn, except Shura's affections for her turn out to be real and not a way to wrap her around his finger.
• Psychopathic Manchild: On top of being a murderous sociopath, he's also incredibly childish, laughing at the Space Battle between his men and the Interstellar Union Army and asking how many died like a little boy watching a fireworks display. He also attacks the Four Shining Stars to get back at Shiki for rejecting his offer of friendship by breaking his "precious toys" like a schoolyard bully would.
• Psychotic Smirk: When he's not wearing a Slasher Smile, he's constantly making this expression to show what an unhinged monster he is.
• A Pupil of Mine Until He Turned to Evil: As with Shiki, Shura learned his Gravity Ether Gear from Ziggy, and he Used to Be a Sweet Kid before falling to The Dark Side.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming:
  • The name Shura itself is the Japanese name for Asura, a power-hungry demigod of war found in Hindu and Buddhist mythology, which perfectly suits his nature.
  • His adoptive family name comes from the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon, reflecting how his father is Emperor of a cosmos filled with oceans.
• Restoration of Sanity: Thanks to the changes in history brought about by the Cosmic Retcon, Universe Zero's Shura doesn't suffer from Parental Neglect, becoming a more mentally and emotionally stable person as a result.
• Royal Brat: Since he's the adopted son of The Emperor, Nero, Shura is absurdly strong and entitled, to the logical detriment of his underlings.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Despite his status as a prince, Shura acts as a Frontline General for the Imperial army, being the first to confront the heroes directly the moment they get involved.
• Sadist: He enjoys watching his victims writhing in agony, whether it's putting crushing them into bloody stains with gravity, cutting them up or humiliating them in his torture chamber, or seeing their friends' and loved one's emotional anguish over it.
• She Is Not My Girlfriend:
  • He very explicitly refers to Ijuna as his "secretary", nothing more, which comes off as odd given his tendencies as The Casanova. This is because Shura knows Ijuna's feelings for him were only artificially induced by her Ether Gear, so he figures that whatever feelings he has for her must also be fake...until Ijuna reveals that her power worked because he'd fallen in love with her for real and didn't realize it.
  • Downplayed when Shura appears in Universe Zero, where he's openly engaged to Ijuna, but gets angry when someone calls her his bride, since they technically haven't wedded yet.
• Sketchy Successor:
  • The people of Aoi view him as one to Nero, who provides some manner of social stability despite his tyranny, while Shura is a psychotic, warmongering manchild who's hated and feared by everyone who works under him.
  • Downplayed with regards to Universe Zero's Shura, who actually becomes The Emperor as a Benevolent Dictator. He's still a reckless, irresponsible Blood Knight whom Nero predicts will become a tyrant without intervention, while his ascension prompts Oasis to rebel because they don't trust a "spoiled rich kid" to effectively run a government, but thanks to Shiki helping him keep his act together, Shura proves his doubters wrong by forming the Aoi Cosmos Republic to take responsibility for the Empire's transgressions.
• Slasher Smile: As an Ax-Crazy, sociopathic dirtbag, Shura makes this expression when he's about to go off and murder somebody.
• Smug Super: He's totally full of himself as a villain, but seeing as his gravity is powerful enough to stop the Edens Zero itself in midair, his confidence isn't unfounded.
• The Sociopath: Shura is selfish, entitled, unstable, violent, and remorseless. He also views people as his possessions, and when he tries to reach out to people on a personal level like when he wants Shiki to be his friend, it's mostly just as a means to an end.
• Sore Loser: Shura can't stand the idea of somebody being better than him, least of all his own father, because he never makes any plans while accounting for how they could possibly go wrong. He nearly gets himself blown up over this by trying to detonate the bombs he was planning to kill Nero with, because he refuses to believe Nero could have Out-Gambitted him.
• The Starscream: Shura has designs to take his adoptive father's place as Emperor, which is why he arranges a war against robot-kind is to make Nero take the fall and be killed by Ziggy.
• Strong and Skilled: As a Gravity Master who's touted as being stronger than either Shiki or Ziggy, Shura shows he has the raw power to stop a warship like the Edens Zero in midair with a wave of his hand, and the technique to dismantle machines to their base components in a matter of seconds. On top of that, he's quick to point out that just because his gravity works more on objects, that doesn't mean he can't use it on himself as effectively as Shiki can, making him a challenging fighter in hand-to-hand combat as well.
• Stupid Evil: Every atrocity he commits is done purely for self-indulgence, whether it's slaughtering his own men for not doing their jobs right, wasting perfectly capable Robot Soldiers out of prejudice, or getting untold numbers of planets reduced to dust just to kill two powerful people. Because of this, his approval ratings are in the pits and nobody likes or respects him, which only fuels his desire to commit more evil.
• Tattooed Crook: His eyes, chest, shoulders, arms and hands are covered in tattoos, and he's a twisted young prince who kills people in horrific ways without a moment's notice.
• Tentacle Hair: Shura's Overdrive changes his Delinquent Hair into a full head of tentacles just like his adoptive father, Nero.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: He plans to kill Ziggy and Nero with the Empire's entire stock of 20,000 Antimatter bombs while they're busy fighting on Nero 1. Any single one of these bombs is enough to reduce a single small planet to dust, and detonating all 20,000 is enough to wipe out a whole planetary sector.
• Took a Level in Badass: The Cosmic Retcon makes Shura far more powerful than he was before, capable of holding his own against Shiki after the latter regains his full power from three years in the future, where he became of the Oración Seis Galáctica.
• Took a Level in Kindness: An exaggerated, non-Character Development example. Shura starts off as a psychotic, hedonistic deadbeat who kills his own men for the slightest insult, and only finds true love after torturing and humiliating Ijuna until he unwittingly drove her insane enough to love him back. Once the Cosmic Retcon occurs, Shura's history is completely altered and turns him into a well-meaning Benevolent Dictator who has a stable relationship with Ijuna, whom he'd never imagine putting through any sort of harm.
• Torture Technician: He makes something of a sick hobby out of torturing captured soldiers of La Résistance, and brings Witch into the mix to torment Shiki. Ijuna, formerly the "princess" of Oasis, was one of his favorite victims, as he came up with some sickening methods of torture and humiliation, which included taking her on "walkies" as his naked Human Pet with a bomb shoved up her rectum.
• Underestimating Badassery: Shura is so convinced he's the ultimate Gravity Master that he underestimates how much of a challenge people can give him. He's caught off guard when Shiki puts up a good fight against him, though he takes it very well, knowing he's found himself a Worthy Opponent. This is especially the case with Nero, whom he pegs as an aging doddard who's weaker fighter than Ziggy, and doesn't expect it when Nero actually appears to kill the Demon King with his own hands.
• Unknowingly in Love: Shura turns out to be in love with Ijuna, whom he orphaned and turned into his personal plaything before he fell for her and turned her into his secretary. Because he knows what a heartless monster he is, however, he figures that he's just been brainwashed by her Ether Gear, which forces people to fall in love. He only realizes his feelings are genuine after Ijuna explains her powers don't work on someone who's never known love before.
• Unwitting Pawn: Ironically, his plans to kill Ziggy only end up working in Ziggy's favor, as Shura and Nero's wrestling over the anti-matter bombs gives Ziggy the weapons he needs to cause the spacetime distortion that would lead to Shiki's death and his own birth.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Back when he first learned how to use his Gravity Ether Gear as a little kid, Shura appeared to be just as excitable and innocent as Shiki. Cut to the present day, where he's a psychotic, murderous deadbeat of a prince, likely as a result of falling into dark gravity.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Shura is introduced completely topless, showing off all the tattoos covering his upper body. He takes to wearing a leather jacket for most of his scenes after that, but doesn't wear a shirt underneath, and goes back to being topless after going into Overdrive.