Let's not mince words here--Demon Slayer looks fantastic. It has a bold art style utilizing thick outlines meshed with incredibly thin outlines while never being afraid to revert to silly, cartoony imagery when necessary. The fights can look memorizing--but unlike many's opinion, I find the 3D a huge turn off. There's a lot of praise for a particular fight that occurs halfway through the show, but I couldn't believe how unbelievably bland the execution was for it despite the novel concept--it's just a character flying around in a rotating 3D model. That's it. This scenario as well as other uses of 3D only serve to take me out of it all. But as for a bit more praise, the sound design is very well done--something that I usually don't think about when it comes to watching anime, frankly. Every impact genuinely carries its weight thanks to the fantastic sound design, and the soundtrack, while forgettable, definitely fits each scene well. Some of the voice acting isn't too bad, either--there are some painfully generic voiced characters (such as most side characters and the villains), but others shine very well in their shoes, like Tanjiro, Inosuke, and Giyu, the last of which doesn't exert himself too much to essentially play his Dororo role again, but hey, he doesn't necessarily need to.
This is where the praise ends, however. I've rated this show a 5 for a reason.
I don't really know how else to word this--Demon Slayer is bordering on the edge of being incompetently written. I say bordering because it's not as if the writing is horrific and unable to be tracked, because you definitely have a solid flow of events from one to the other and know what's going on all times. The problem is that it's 100% comprised of shonen tropes and bland dialogue, and nothing else. There are nearly zero shreds of originality found within Demon Slayer despite the interesting concepts introduced, like Tanjiro traveling with his demon sister, a man that wears a boars head, a corp of demon slayers unofficially sanctioned by the government--these are all cool and all, but the show doesn't REALLY do anything memorable or interesting with them in execution. When I watched Demon Slayer, all I could think was that I was watching some sort of "Shonen's Best Hits!" collection and would rather just be watching Hunter x Hunter instead.
Let me explain, because it's not fair to go "oh this sucks, this sucks, and this sucks" and leave it at that. The show is dull, and it is this way because it does not try to be anything else. There are a huge amount of fights, but none of them--and I do genuinely mean NONE--are ever solved with clever thinking, ingenuity, or--christ--having a character lose so that they can come back and try again with a new strategy or take. Instead, every fight ends with deus ex machinas--either the main character "believes" hard enough or he's rescued by someone else. That's it. That's every fight in the show. After watching Kaiji or, again, HxH, it just feels downright insulting to watch these battles unfold the same bland way over and over.
But when they aren't fighting, it's time for the characters to shine--kidding, they're all about as boring as the combat scenes are. When you write a character, you genuinely have some strong two dimensional elements to them--"Character is SAD because of issue, but is also ANGRY because of this issue. Character LIKE one thing and HATES one other thing"--you then expand on the concept and flesh them out so that they feel like a real human being. Such is not the case for Demon Slayer, in which characters are represented by their initial markings--Tanjiro is DETERMINED and KIND and LOVES his sister--and then never expanded on any further. No, seriously, try to argue the point after 26 episodes. He develops in no way whatsoever beyond these facets. The viewer never sees Tanjiro really come to terms of even really talk about his family's slayings. Tanjiro never expresses any interest in any sort of hobby or interest that doesn't have anything to do with fighting demons and holding his sister. He's just your run-of-the-mill shonen protagonist who fights for good, and that's it. The problem's made even worse when the show REFUSES to stop fellating the main character, with nearly every single interaction with Tanjiro and another character ending with them ooing and aahing over how kind he is, how noble he is, how gentle he is, and whatever else. It feels like a bizarre hug box and gets grating fast, as if Demon Slayer wants to have us believe Tanjiro is Jesus Christ himself.
You might read this and think I find Tanjiro the worst character of the show, but you couldn't be more wrong. That right belongs solely to Zenitsu, the blonde haired banshee of a character that feels genuinely written to spite his audience, as if Koyoharu Gotōge wanted his viewers to actually suffer while watching. Zenitsu feels as if he's straight from hell. From the moment we see his appearance on screen, he's already a miserable, loudly crying baby of a character--and do not mistake my words, for I love a character that can be realistically emotional and expressive, like Shinji of EVA. Zenitsu is not like this in any capacity, however. Nearly every scene depicting him shows him screaming, yelling, crying, wailing, and otherwise being a noise polluting nuisance. Most of Demon Slayer's awful excuse for "comedy" revolves around Zenitsu, with many scenes showing him being a coward--for laughs? It's really not funny the fifth time--or horny, as Koyoharu, for whatever reason, thinks it's goddamn hilarious that Zenitsu can't help himself from exploding in affectionate energy and chasing women--it happens constantly. He's written to be redeemed by his ability to perform like an amazing fighter when passed out, but honestly? That's such a crock and does not forgive or pardon, whatsoever, the suffering of having to deal with his character the other 99% of the time.
It's just a shame because it's very impressive that Demon Slayer is both written and illustrated by Koyoharu, and there ARE good puzzle pieces lying around that could be more narratively captivating, but instead the show is clearly just a vehicle to showcase interesting animation and stop at that. Demon Slayer is an unfortunate example of pure mediocrity, performing no better than its predecessors and certainly not its successors. At the end of the day, Demon Slayer is a shonen anime, and besides fantastic stand-outs like HxH, it's a genre that lends itself to this cartoonish blandness. Either watch these 26 episodes because you want to admire neat art, or just skip it and watch something more worth your time.
