Puppet Technique

The Puppet Technique is one of three signature fighting styles native to the Land of Wind which uses chakra threads to control puppets like marionettes. Those who uses this style are known as puppeteers and most belong to the Sunagakure’s Puppet Brigade.

It’s said that puppetry was first brought to the land in ancient times by a clan of strange travellers with string-controlled puppets as a type of entertainment. It was  Chikamatsu Monzaemon who turned that art into a tool for battle. Supposedly, the Chikamatsu Collection of Ten Puppets was based on a painting of the people who introduced puppetry in the first place in respect to its origins. The white coats they wore actually started a tradition where each puppeteer would chose signature colour for their puppets and techniques.

The style is very demanding as, in addition to practicing puppetry, it requires the construction, maintenance and improvement of the puppet (or puppets) that each puppeteer’s fighting style is based upon. Mastery typically forces them to neglect other skills which is why they specialize in long-range combat through their puppets while being weak at close-range themselves.

To perform the technique, the puppeteer extends threads of chakra from their fingertips and attaches it to the puppet. Chakra threads possess a strength and dexterity that physical ones lack; they can be attached to any material, extend as far as the caster’s control allows and can lift objects of different sizes and weights without any strain, even holding puppets aloft while fighting.

The concentrated nature of the chakra as it is condensed into threads makes it visible to the naked eye, just like real wires even if they aren’t always easy to catch. But that chakra can be suppressed to the point that the threads are invisible but still effective, a skill that every puppeteer learns to prevent their enemies from learning the location of their true body if they choose to hide while their puppet fights in their stead.

Each thread connects to a different part of the puppet and the movements of their arms, hands and fingers control its body. The greater the skill of the puppeteer, the less exaggerated their movements need to be because the chakra itself is able to generate a response in the puppet so that it moves as they desire. Puppets are frequently stored inside scrolls to prevent their size and weight from impeding the puppeteer, especially as the number of puppets they have grows.

The greatest strength of a puppet is that they can be built to include additional mechanics such as hidden weaponry, tools and traps which can be activated with their chakra. They are even made to possess chakra-type weapons such as swords and shields. As technology progressed this has grown to include radios, listening devices and cameras for espionage; a role that was supplemented by specialized disguises that would give the puppets the same appearance as a living person.

And because puppeteers are weak in close-combat, it became a staple of their style to heavily rely on using poison with their puppets to kill their opponent as fast as possible. Any weapon inside the puppet is coated in poison and they store gas canisters that releases poisonous gases on command.

Puppets do not always refer to lifeless dolls either. A puppeteer can attach their chakra threads to a human body and use that as a tool, a technique that originated on the battlefield where they would use corpses when their puppets had been destroyed. But it can also be used to control a living enemy or ally for different purposes.

For all that puppeteers are often looked down on, few are foolish enough to believe they are not a credible threat.

Most Famous Users

Chikamatsu Monzaemon – The inventor of the Puppet Technique who originally wanted nothing more than to produce a masterful puppet performance. Simply for the sake of that, he devised a method of controlling puppet without strings and just chakra, manipulating his puppets like a natural extension of the body. He constructed ten puppets that were considered the pinnacle of the art and could control each one with a single finger.

Shamon – The Second Kazekage was unorthodox in his style of Puppet Technique. Instead of controlling as many puppets as possible, he focused on controlling only one puppet at a time. But these puppets were large and complex constructs filled with incredibly complicated weapons arrays that made fighting them a nightmare. Shamon was also someone who saw value in puppets who could move themselves, resulting was a technique that was able to animate his puppets with chakra without threads and allow them to move autonomously. They were, however, quite limited in ability and intelligence.

Chiyo – She was the greatest puppeteer of her time when she mastered the highest known level of puppetry that control a puppet with each finger just like Monzaemon. Like the Second Kazekage she tried to create autonomous puppets, inventing a technique that could give life to puppets at the cost of the caster’s own, though she was motivated by sentiment rather than pragmatism. Her skill granted her the right to wield his greatest collection of puppets herself and, in one particularly famous battle, she used that Chikamatsu Collection to conquer an entire castle.

Sasori – He surpassed the supposed limit of what a puppeteer could do by controlling a hundred puppets with chakra threads from his fingertips, and then revolutionised puppetry itself with the invention of human puppets that surpassed any man-made puppet. The culmination of both these skills is the Red Secret Technique: Performance of a Hundred Puppets, a technique that Sasori used to destroy a country single-handedly.

Human Puppet

The Human Puppet is a puppet made from a human corpse, first invented by Sasori of the Red Sand.

They are built by removing the skin, blood and internal organs from the body and then preserving what remains from decomposition by transforming them into a hollow puppet with a kinjutsu. All that remains is a small nucleus of organic flesh that resides within the core of the puppet.

Using that living flesh, the puppet retains the chakra and abilities that it possessed in life. Just as a human corpse can reveal what techniques they used in life, the human puppet has their techniques ingrained in their altered flesh. With that, Sasori can command the puppet to use their techniques through his chakra threads. But that is naturally more difficult than simply controlling the puppet alone, enough to make it hard to do so when controlling multiple puppets.

Like regular puppets, they can be changed and improved by adding a variety of mechanisms to improve their functions such as hidden weapons, gas chambers and storage spaces. Their bodies are actually tougher than what is normally used to construct puppets and since they possess chakra, they are far more responsive to chakra threads than regular puppets.

Sasori himself is the pinnacle of human puppets as he is the only subject to have been transformed into one while still alive. The metamorphosis collected all of his blood and organs and compressed them into the nucleus of flesh that would continually create chakra and act as a vessel for his consciousness, something all other human puppets lack. He was more than just a human puppet, he was a living puppet.

He made countless preparations to make his puppet body into the ultimate weapon that could restore itself back to prime condition no matter how many times it is destroyed. As long as his nucleus remained intact, he could even hijack his other puppets and convert them into an image of his own body to ensure that he was never vulnerable. And because he lacked the biological functions and weaknesses of a human body, his stamina was only used up when he actively created chakra which meant that he had a lot more chakra to use in combat than he ever did as a living human.

This transformation advanced the ability of his puppetry skills by far as he became able to extend chakra strings directly from his nucleus to his puppets, removing the need for any movement whatsoever as well as the time lag between commands. Sasori attained what could literally be called an inhuman skill level with the Puppet Technique.