In my on-going quest to actually watch TV shows and movies on my own, rather than wait for the opportunity to watch them with someone, I did a full re-watch of the first two seasons of Demon Slayer and then watched season 3 (called the Swordsmith Village arc). The whole show is visually stunning, and not just in the quality of the animation (which is consistently high, a fact made possible by the lengthy time between each season or arc’s release). Every visual is gorgeous, from the various moves performed by the titular Demon Slayers to the flashy, powerful maneauvers of the more powerful demons. The whole series does a great job of balancing interesting, unique characters, absolutely killer fight scenes, and plot progression, even if the pacing of individual episodes frequently feels off to me. Specifically, some of the episodes hit their mid-episode break with a scene that I feel should have been the end of an episode and sometimes an episode ends at a point where I’d expect to find a quick commercial break. The beat-to-beat pacing is absolutely stellar, though, so I’m not sure there’s much they could do to fix the episode thing and I’m pretty sure it’s just me and my mind’s desire to find patterns in everything.
Aside from this disruption of what I feel is the natural pattern of anime episodes, the entire show is a showcase in excellence. I’ve heard the budget for this show is quite high, which is probably why the show is as well-done as it is, but it still takes a skilled team of artists, writers, and actors to pull it off. This show is absolutely firing on all cylinders and even the times when the show must bow to convention with the occasional bit of fan service, it does it in a way that feels fairly natural for an otherwise fairly serious show. There is a time and a place for everything and Demon Slayer shows you really can have it all. Plus, while it is somewhat gratuitous in the moment (as is all fan service), it never overstays the moment and it is frequently acknowledged by the characters in the show as being out of the ordinary or odd in some way. And, when that’s just the costume of the demon the protagonists are fighting (which the camera rarely lingers on outside of the moments the demon is trying to use her appearance to her advantage), the show accepts it and moves forward without undue comment.
As the show progresses, I’ve started to get a feel for the overall plot. I’ve avoided reading the manga, aside from a few early volumes I bought to help tide me over while I waited for season 3 to finally release, so I’m still unfamiliar with how the story will end. I want to enjoy the show as it comes out and then turn to the manga if I feel the need to experience more of the story (or compare the anime to the original manga), especially since I want to enjoy the anticipation and guesswork that comes with watching a show. It’s a lot more difficult to embrace that with a manga because I can just absolutely tear through a huge number of those in a day or two. There isn’t much room to ponder things between story beats if I’m just grabbing the next volume off my shelf or out of the delivery box (or just reading the next chapter from the digital copy I’ve acquired). Watching it as a show forces me to consume it more slowly and gives me plenty of space to consider it as the demands of my life pull me away from my TV. I love a show that makes me think about what its saying or where its going and Demon Slayer is doing both.
It’s interesting to see the character arcs play out so quickly, though, now that I’ve done a full rewatch. It’s fun to see the character growth occur in a more rapid fashion than I could originally. I mean, sure, I watched Tanjiro, the protagonist, lose some of his compassion and gain a healthy dose of anger and rage when I went through it initially, but if I hadn’t done a rewatch, I might have missed the way that his rage has twisted his original compassion such that he feels even more angry when a demon tries to play the victim as he’s about to finally kill them. It feels especially impactful for him to be this angry, after all, since he is capable of showing compassion to his defeated opponents if they express regret or have been obviously twisted by the demon who made them. When he gets mad and refuses any reaction but righteous fury to the pleas of a demon, it really hits home that the being he is about to slaughter has done nothing to earn the mercy they’re attempting to evoke.
What sits with me the most about this show isn’t something about the show at all, though. The friend who introduced me to the show, the same one who I’ve cut ties with due to his handling of the whole wizard school debacle, had us skip over a portion of the first season. Specifically, the flashbacks that showed us the life of the first major demon that Tanjiro fights. At the time, I had no reason to doubt this person when he said that it was just weirdly trying to evoke pity from us to match the pity that Tanjiro expressed. As time went on, as we watched season 2, I began to doubt his word since what it tended to show us wasn’t just a simple display of their pathetic, unfortunate lives from before they became demons but information that Tanjiro intuited from the banter as they fought. When I rewatched the series, it confirmed this idea that the demons it wanted us to be sympathetic towards were criminals and murderers, sure, but ones who had been forced into it by a manipulative jerk who was clearly only working for his own inscrutable ends. They deserved our pity because they were forced into a situation by someone who used their weaknesses against them and, in almost all cases, didn’t make it clear what price they’d be paying for this decision they were making. The show wasn’t trying to show us that they weren’t worthy of being destroyed for their actions but that sometimes all it takes is the right bit of temptation to turn anyone into a monster. They were not vile by nature, just weak. They weren’t iredeemable, just lost. Sure, redemption required their death, but they also weren’t the person they’d been. They were changed by their experiences and often had no means of restoring themselves other than their death.
It is difficult not to see some of them and think “there, but for the grace of this being entirely fictional go I.” Most of them were preyed upon, even if the demon who changed them didn’t eat them. Honestly, the whole thing can be read as a metaphor for cycles of trauma and abuse without too much effort. Which, you know, just makes me think less of the person who insisted that I was missing nothing by not watching a scene he clearly didn’t understand. I feel like I might have realized something important at that point if I’d insisted we just watch the episode as I’d wanted to at the time. Still, it’s a great show and I managed to get the full, proper experience my second time around which has only made the show rise in my estimation. That’s saying something, considering how much I enjoyed it beforehand. I highly recommend giving it a watch if you’ve got the time and don’t mind some gore, violence, and a bit of horror.