Yukime
Age: 16 | Species: Yuki-onna | Height: 163cm
Yukime is a snow yōkai from the mountains of northern Japan whose entire arc revolves around her obsessive love for Nūbē. She first met him five years before the main story when he was a college student lost while skiing—he saved her from a hunter who wanted to kill her before she could grow up and curse his village. She became fixated on the idea of them being together "in eternal love," which initially meant freezing Nūbē in ice so he'd live with her forever in the mountains. His students talked her out of it, and she eventually decided to stick around Doumori instead, getting a job as an ice skating coach while trying to actually win his heart the normal way.
As a yuki-onna, Yukime can create and control ice and snow, freezing targets at will. Her powers work for offense, defense, even making shaved ice—though Nūbē jokes that last use is the only good one. She has a slight healing ability and naturally excels at figure skating. The downside is brutal: she can't handle heat and literally risks melting if she wears certain black clothes or gets too warm. Her workaround is wrapping herself in a snowman to cool down, which embarrasses Nūbē when she emerges naked from it.
Her main character drive is the messy love triangle with Nūbē and Ritsuko-sensei, a beautiful teacher Nūbē actually returns feelings for. Yukime's desperation escalates when a Mountain God's servant tricks her into believing she needs to kill Ritsuko to become human and win Nūbē over. She can't go through with it, realizes Ritsuko isn't her enemy, and in the ensuing battle with the servant, she burns herself out completely, turning to snowflakes in Nūbē's arms.
She wasn't actually dead though. Her snowflakes blew back to the mountains, where the Mountain God recreated her as a new yuki-onna—same appearance, same name, but with a genuinely cold heart and no memories of Nūbē. This version actually tried to kill him during a school trip. But fragments of the original Yukime's warmth and memories leaked through when he let her attack him, confusing her enough to make her flee.
Eventually the two Yukimes merged back together. She returned to Doumori, worked through her conflicting feelings, and decided to stay. She recovered her memories and balanced out into someone who was both the childish girl Nūbē first knew and the stronger, more assertive yōkai she'd become.
In the anime's dream-world arc, an alternate version of Yukime existed as a full-fledged yuki-onna still in town, though in that reality Nūbē was catatonic and they weren't together.
Content compiled by AnimeList.moe from publicly available sources.
