Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Entertainment District Arc

Episode 11

Prepare your torches and pitchforks everyone, because after watching “No Matter How Many”, my verdict on the super-sized finale of the Entertainment District Arc, is…that it's perfectly fine. It's even pretty good, in spots. In fact, given how relatively underwhelming I found the endings to both Season 1 and the Mugen Train Arc, I suppose that “No Matter How Many” technically wins the award for being the best season finale that Demon Slayer has produced yet. It isn't going to blow anyone's minds, but Demon Slayer fans will find plenty to chew on all the same.

The only people who are likely to be especially disappointed are the ones who thought last week's “It isn't over!” cliffhanger was building towards something exciting or unexpected. As it turns out, thanks to Nezuko popping out of her box to Deus Ex-Machina her way to a happy ending for everyone—well, mostly everyone—there isn't any extra action or suspense when it comes to the Daki/Gyutaro fight. Those two are decapitated and done for from the minute the finale starts, and the whole of the finale is concerned with only two main things: Catching up with our heroes in the aftermath of the battle and giving the demon siblings their prerequisite backstory dump.

The good news is that all of the good guys made it out of this battle just fine. Both Inosuke and Uzui are the worst for wear out of everyone, but Nezuko's magic fire whatsits are here to insta-heal Inosuke's messed up innards and all of the poison that is coursing through Uzui's veins. It's not exactly a complete asspull on Demon Slayer's part, since we've established that Nezuko can use her fire magics to do stuff like this before, but I won't blame anyone for feeling that this finale is still a little cheap in that regard. One of the only major takeaways of this fight was how insanely hard it is to kill Upper-Level demons, so while I don't begrudge the show for not killing anyone, it does feel a little easy to have the worst of the battle's consequences get literally handwaved away. Except for all of the non-important, regular people who lived in the district, I suppose; the whole town looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and I can only imagine that their lives are just absolutely ruined.

Speaking of ruined lives, with Daki and Gyutaro lying body-less on the ground, bickering to their very last breaths, that means that the only thing left to do is to give them both a super tragic backstory flashback that will take up a majority of the finale's runtime. I don't want to sound too aloof here, since the siblings' lives really did go straight to hell in a hand-basket before they became demons, and the show's incredible production values work to sell every single second's worth of drama and misery. I'm not about to sit here and tell you that I didn't feel at least a little bad for tiny Gyutaro when he was stuck freezing in the snow, cradling his half-dead sister's burnt-up body. I also won't tell you that I was completely unaffected when the two souls finally made up in their final moments before descending into the underworld together, with Gyutaro even having remembered his sister's name for the first time in who knows how long. It was Ume, not Daki. Maybe, in another life, the pair will actually have a chance at being happy.

That said, this routine is a well-worn habit of Demon Slayer's at this point, and I am struggling to see why, exactly, the siblings' flashback needed so much extra time and attention when it only serves to make a point that the show has made so many times before: These demons were human once, and it sucks that Tanjiro has to kill them. It's blunt-force empathy that we don't even get to appreciate until after the characters we're supposed to be relating to are already dead and gone. I would have loved to learn more about Daki's relationship with Muzan, and what she and Gyutaro had to do to work their way up through the ranks over the years. Yes, their childhood was sad, and you can draw some parallels to their struggles vs. what Tanjiro and Nezuko have gone through, but we didn't need a whole giant flashback to get that message across.

If anything, my reservations with this finale, and with the whole of the Entertainment District Arc in general, is how little progress it feels like the story has made over the course of so many episodes. I like that Uzui and his wives are going to have their nice, retired life together, but that honestly feels like the biggest development of this whole episode, and it doesn't even concern any of our main characters. The very end of the episode is even more foreshadowing about Tanjiro becoming a Hashira and taking on Muzan, but I honestly couldn't tell you how much he's grown, either as a person or a fighter, since the beginning of this arc to now, or what exactly led him to achieve that growth. As for Muzan, I am really surprised at how little he had to do this season, since the premiere really seemed to be setting up a larger role for the character in the story. He's just as enigmatic and two-dimensional as he was at the end of Season 1, and I don't think that's a very good sign.

Still, “No Matter How Many” is a decent conclusion to a generally strong, if overlong, season. It's a well-produced coda to ten episodes of pure spectacle and suspense, if nothing else, and it does its job of getting you to see the humanity of the monsters that Tanjiro has to fight. When I look at this season as a whole, combined with the Mugen Train Arc that came before it, it is hard to shake the feeling that Demon Slayer, as a story, is struggling to hold up as it continues to stretch and pad things out. As entertainment, though, the series is still an industry titan, and there's no reason to suspect that ufotable is going to be pumping the brakes any time soon. It'll be interesting to see how Tanjiro and Co. handle the even tougher opponents that are waiting for them down the road, and since the next season of the show just got announced, it looks like we won't have to wait too long to find out.

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Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Entertainment District Arc is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.