Review of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Entertainment District Arc

It is sad to see that animation of this level is not met with a story that does it justice. (Spoilers ahead) Demon Slayer and I have a weird relationship. I thought the first season was pretty good, having animation and CGI combined in such a way that it didn't look jarring and added to the overall impact of a fight, making it that much better. The plot of the first season was really interesting as well. It did a great job at introducing the world and how everything works. It had some incredibly emotional moments and some breathtaking fights. Fast forward to the Mugen Train movie.The movie was fantastic. It took everything that made the first season great, and improved upon it and, because they realised that this arc is better suited to be told in a movie format, made a movie instead of a season. However, they then undid that decision for some reason making a season of that same Mugen Train arc. And as I mentioned before, this arc just isn't told in a very satisfying way when it is airing one episode a week.

Now the reason as to why I am mentioning this is that I think similar mistakes were made. The pacing of this season is just not good. Everything moves so slowly in the beginning and it doesn't really get that much better toward the end. This season has similar issues as the previous one, because they haven't found a satisfying way to tell this story in a weekly release format. Each episode ends on a cliffhanger but isn't resolved with real consequences in the end. For example, in the final fight between the 4 Demon Slayers and the 2 Upper Ranks, they constantly pull a uno reverse card, one upping each other every time. Inosuke gets pierced by a scythe laced with poison through his throat, but in the next episode appears to be fine because - he grew up in the mountains? Uzui gets poisoned as well and we even see him, presumably dead, on the ground, not moving, but in the next episode he appears again with a cut off arm and I'm just left to wonder why he was pretending to be dead in the first place when he could've simply cut his arm off and prevented further harm on his allies. It is things like this that consistently distracted me from how great the animation looked.

But my biggest annoyance throughout this season is that a lot of time is wasted with unnecessary elements, most notably the flashback in the last episode, which is the reason this is a 6/10 and not a 7/10. This flashback perfectly shows how off the pacing of the show is and why the animation couldn't save it. Why would I care about the backstory of two character who are in the moment dying and have no further impact on the story in the future. Why wasn't this shown to me some time before the fight so that I at least cared a little about the demons. This could've made that final fight much more emotional because we have at least seen what the demons have gone through and why they now do what they do.

It is these small things that, throughout the show, keep adding up and just make it more frustrating to watch because in the end, this is supposed to be a good show with breathtaking animation but its biggest obstacle right now seems to be its plot.