Aiden: We have a problem.
We know Scott was able to push through mountain ash once with extreme effort and force of will.
And Parrish just heated up the air so much around the barrier, the wood burned away.
But the Oni are very different. So far, the demon warriors are the only
thing we saw literally beat their way through a mountain ash barrier.
First we have to figure out what makes the Oni different
from all the other supernaturals on the show.
Silverfinger: They're called Oni. They are demons and they are unstoppable.
The Oni are a force of nature. You don't fight a tsunami.
You endure it and you hope that you are not destroyed in its path.
Terrifying to look at, and hard to stop, the Oni seemed scary, but they were really only puppets.
At the start of their arc, Noshiko Yukimura sent them to find out which one of Scott’s
pack was possessed by the Nogitsune. And they were completely harmless,
unless you tried to stop them from completing that mission.
From that perspective the mountain ash barrier at the house was in the way of their mission,
so being an unstoppable force of nature, they pounded on it until they broke it,
that makes sense, but it doesn’t tell us why they
could break through what is supposed to be an unbreakable, supernatural barrier.
To answer that question, I’m going to have to speculate, and some of this new speculation will
build on my prior speculation about how energy flows and manifests in the Teen Wolf universe.
In other words, I’m taking what we know to be canon and piecing that
together to make sense of something that was never explained on the show.
Based on what we know, the Oni are like the Nogitsune in that they are spirits
with no bodies. Instead of possessing someone like Void did with Stiles, the Oni appear to
turn natural energy into matter to form the armor and weapons that make up their physical bodies.
I’ve talked a lot about natural energy in this universe. It flows
through telluric currents and is focused into powerful areas like the Nemeton.
And while the raw wood of the Mountain Ash tree has a sedative effect and repels supernaturals.
if you combine it with the energy in the currents and make a complete circuit, it forms a barrier
that physically repels the supernatural spark within every shapeshifter we saw on the show.
The oni, are different, the bodies they use are literally
this same natural energy transformed into matter.
They’re entities summoned to this plane by the breaking of
one of Noshiko’s tails. They use the natural energy present in the telluric
currents and focused by the Nemeton to give them shape and physicality.
Knowing these two things, I surmise that Mountain Ash barriers won’t work as well on them.
While the barrier still rejects the spirit inside,
it is less effective against the physical bits because, the bodies, the masks,
the armor, and the weapons, are all made from the same energy that makes up the barrier.
Let me try it another way.
The oni are already tapped into the natural energy flow, it maintains their bodies
and weapons. It allows them to vanish and reappear somewhere else along the currents.
It just makes sense to me that, since they’re always plugged into the same current,
they could cause a short in the system that would collapse a barrier powered by that current.