Puppet Jutsu (
Official Jutsu)
The Puppet Jutsu is a style of ninjutsu which uses chakra threads to control puppets like marionettes. It is one of three signature fighting styles native to the Land of Wind. Someone who uses this style is known as a puppeteer and most practitioners belong to the Hidden Sand's Puppet Brigade.
It's said that puppetry was first brought to the land in ancient times by a clan of strange travelers as a type of entertainment in the form of theater with string-controlled puppets. It was a shinobi - Chikamatsu Monzaemon - who turned that art into a tool for battle. And, in the respect to the roots of puppetry, The Chikamatsu Collection of Ten Puppets was supposedly based on a painting of the people who introduced puppetry in the first place.
The jutsu 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. The mastery required typically forces them to neglect their other skills which makes them specialize in long-range combat through their puppets while being weak at close-range combat themselves. It is traditional for a puppeteer to choose a specific color as the signature for their puppets and jutsu.
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.
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, they 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 being cumbersome.
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 even grown to include radios, listening devices and cameras for espionage. And that role 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 could 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.
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 Jutsu, he 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 master-level puppets and could control each one with a single finger.
Shamon - The Second Kazekage was unorthodox in his style of Puppet Jutsu. Instead controlling as many puppets as possible, he focused on controlling 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.
Chiyo - She was the greatest puppeteer of her time when she mastered the same single finger technique as Monzaemon and controlled his greatest collection of puppets herselft. In one particularly famous battle, Chiyo used that Chikamatsu Collection to conquer an entire castle.
Sasori of the Red Sand - 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 Jutsu: Hundred Puppet Performance, a jutsu 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's left from decomposition by transforming them into a hollow puppet with a forbidden jutsu. 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 jutsu they used in life, the human puppet has their jutsu ingrained in their altered flesh. With that, Sasori can command the puppet to use their jutsu through his chakra strings. But that is naturally more difficult than simply controlling the puppet alone, enough so that it's unfeasible with his Hundred Puppet Performance as his attention is split between controlling so many puppets at once.
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 puppet bodies are actually tougher than what is normally used to construct puppet 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 other human puppets would lack. He was more than just a human puppet, he is a living puppet.
He made countless preparations to make his puppet body into the ultimate weapon and one that can mend itself back to prime condition no matter how many times it is destroyed. As long as his nucleus remains, he can 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 lacks the biological functions and weaknesses of a human body, his stamina is only used up when he actively creates chakra which means that he has a lot more chakra to use in combat than he ever did as a living human.
And changing himself like this 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 any time lag between commands. Sasori attained what could literally be called an inhuman skill level with the Puppet Jutsu.
