Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Entertainment District Arc

Episode 5

In “Things Are Gonna Get Flashy”, things in Demon Slayer get, well, flashy. Kind of. It's definitely the start of the all-out action extravaganza that I presume will take up the rest of the Entertainment District Arc season, though it remains to be seen how the pacing and plotting of it all will pan out. As Mugen Train so handily demonstrated, sometimes it is indeed possible for a story be all killer and some filler.

The story of this episode is broken up into two fairly distinct halves: In Part A, Tanjiro continues to take on Daki in the streets of the Red-Light District. It's…fine? It's fine! As I've said before, with a studio like ufotable, you can't simply toss five stars on every episode that looks fancy (or should I say “flashy”?), because that's what everyone already expects from Demon Slayer. Don't get me wrong: I'll never turn down a serving of sakuga, but if I'm getting a delicious and perfectly moist steak delivered to me day after day, I'm going to have to start looking for variations and exciting experiments in the recipe if I don't want to get bored. In this case, the variations come from the ways that the gorgeous animation works in tandem with the story, the characters, the choreography, and even the comedy to make Demon Slayer into something with—ideally—enough substance to go along with all of its sizzle.

The Daki V. Tanjiro fight has a few things going for it. Daki herself, for one, is a more interesting villain for our boy to fight compared to, say, the Train Demon, both as a character and as a component of the spectacle. Her visual design is striking, and the CGI used to animate her whippy tendrils looks less out of place with the environment compared to Train Demon's goo-bits. The back and forth between the two is also decently fun to watch—Daki alternates between being surprised at Tanjiro's strength and gleefully toying with him, which is a good energy for the battle to have.

The downsides come from Demon Slayer's usual struggles in the Tanjiro department. He's a good boy, but I've always thought that Tanjiro is only as good as the people he's surrounded by, on both sides of the hero/villain spectrum, and he usually works best when his friends are teaming up with him to take down a threat. It's a nebulous sort of reaction that I'm trying to pin down, but I guess I find Tanjiro on his own to be a little…boring? Or maybe just a touch conservative compared to his weird friends and his wild sister. It doesn't help that the show does that annoying thing where it cuts to a bunch of exposition in a flashback that is meant to explain why Tanjiro is limited in both his Water Breathing and his Fire Breathing styles, but it really seems like the kind of stuff we ought to have learned before the fight. Learning about Tanjiro's struggles with fevers and muscle cramps by way of clumsy flashbacks just doesn't feel like the best way to go about things.

Point being, the Tanjiro v. Daki fight is fine, for now, but the show is clearly still ramping up for the real showcase to come. In Inosuke's half of the episode, however, Demon Slayer gets just wild enough to keep the momentum going. For one, we begin the fight with Inosuke dislocating all of his joints to snake-slither his way into Daki's torture-dungeon/makeshift pantry, and that's before we even get to any more fighting. It's the kind of gross, dumb, and off-putting development that is both completely unnecessary and weirdly endearing. Then, when Inosuke digs his way into the den, he discovers the bonkers enemy that he'll be facing down, which is Daki's…what do I even call it? Her fabric familiar?

Everyone starts calling it “Worm Belt”, and it looks like the hot-pink cousin of that one string-bean monster from Aaahh!!! Real Monsters (shout out to the fellow 90s Babies that will get that Nicktoons deep cut). This is already, to me, a more interesting setup than simply watching Tanjiro scrape by against Daki, and there's the added bonus of Inosuke rescuing Suma and Makio, two of the missing Ninja Wives that Uzui has been hunting after. Zenitsu is here too, I guess, though I felt vindicated when Inosuke's first remark after seeing the damage that the orange dweeb can do was, “Maybe you should just be asleep all of the time.” Preach, my boar-headed brother. Preach.

I'll be honest, though: While I enjoyed the Worm Belt shenanigans, I'm not sold on Uzui's wives just yet. Suma is the kind of helpless airhead that was already tired comedy relief trope back in the 2000s, and Makio is…spunky? I don't really know. We catch up with Hinatsuru, too, but between her weepy reunion with Uzui and the late episode flashback where Uzui tells all of his wives about the mandate to look out for themselves over anything else, I can't say I care a whole lot about any of these new characters. I appreciate Uzui's “Wife Guy” attitude, since it's pretty funny and a refreshing change of pace compared to the children we're usually following, but the wives are going to need more than some funny faces and a few head pats to make an impression.

The good news, depending on how you look at it, is that we're only just getting started with the arc's climax. Uzui still has to get in on the action, the boys have to get back together to take on Daki, and I can only pray that Nezuko gets let out of that goddamn box sometime. There are plenty of opportunities for Demon Slayer to mix up the action and give characters that aren't named Inosuke an opportunity to prove their worth to this particular story. I just hope Entertainment District Arc takes advantage of them.

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

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.