on demonslayer

Gabe Janisz
Nov 4 · 3 min read

Every one on ‘the net’ has been going wild or this newish anime, kimetsu no yaiba, so I watched it. I watched all of it!! because that’s what i do. Final Verdict: it’s bad. So why did I keep watching it? Partly it let me be uninvolved while watching TV when my anxiety was creeping up high. But also, the fight scenes are incredible! They use digital post for the backgrounds and the sword trails, which makes it highly kinetic but also easy to follow. Every move feels planned, illustrated, with a good sense of space, which is something I love.

But every moment that there isn’t a fight scene I can feel myself dying. The characters are not only uncreative, but they move past uncreative, they become grotesque. There’s nothing especially interesting about the main character or his demon sister- perhaps I’ve grown jaded to the brother/sister trope present in a lot of japanese media, because it doesn’t really exist in america. Heck, I’m not even sure it actually exists in Japan. But if that’s all you have to offer me in terms of character, seriously, sign me out, your show is worthless. The demon shit, the blood shit… its all been done, it’s been done better, in a hundred different ways, a hundred different places. As far as side characters, normally a character is like, lecherous and lazy and I can be like, haha, anime, even if I don’t enjoy it, but with this show it doesn’t STOP. One character won’t move an inch before bitching and complaining a hundred times, and they reuse the gag every single time he’s present- WHY ARE PEOPLE OKAY WITH THIS. He’s turns cool when he falls asleep but that’s also a stupid idea and it almost never happens. The other side character is this dude who wears a boar’s head, and for some reason they decided early on to reveal what he looks like underneath: shocker, it doesn’t make sense.

If I haven’t made it abundantly clear, I hate how this show looks. the eyes look bad. the head shapes look bad. The outfits look bad. The demon designs are uninspired and terrible. Everything is built out of broken shapes. It’s not as bad as Haikyuu (which is animated well, but drawn poorly) but not a lot is. One enemy had the kind-of-cool power to control the building they were in (rotate the room, change where doors lead) and he had a charming backstory about someone dissing his novel, but they ruin that by making his power controlled by these fuckin bongos growing out of his body that he has to play, it looks awful!! and not in a soul eater “this is great” way, just in a “why would you do this” way. Another enemy injects you with poison to turn you into a spider with a human head and one character gets partially spider-ized and has to spend weeks getting his body grown back to normal size. That’s not scary, or cool, or interesting, it’s just really gross!!!

The storyline is the least inspired part of the show which is saying a lot, really. Main Guy (I dont remember his name) is walking home from selling sticks or whatever and Old Dude is like “youd better watch out, demons come out at night!” and Main Guy is like “haha you cant be serious!! just more of your stories old man!!” and Old Dude goes “Oh, I’m serious. But we have he Demon Slayers to protect us, and kill the Demons” That conversation literally happens and it’s maybe the worst piece of exposition I’ve ever witnessed in a show. Are the demon slayers a rumor? a secret? does everyone know about them?? any way you slice it the way he talks about them is suuuper awkward and dumb

I hate this show

why do people like it? the fight scenes? maybe, but I see people fawning over the characters and stuff, which is baffling. Maybe its like comfort food or something, which is baffling. I just remember when I thought I’d watched every episode, and another episode popped up in my crunchyroll queue. I hope that doesn’t happen again

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