Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Hashira Training Arc

Episode 4

I promised myself that I would start things off on a positive note, this week, so here we go: Tokito's shitty raven friend is cute as heck. I wish she'd stick around to dunk on folks every single week. Also, it's kind of adorable how excited Tokito is to see Tanjiro show up for training. See! I can be so positive about Demon Slayer when I put my mind to it!

As for the rest of this episode, though… Well, I can only ask one question: What the hell are we even doing at this point? Like, sure, I've talked about how this series can often function best when it's operating on a purely “vibes”-based level but I didn't mean that I wanted this season to transform into a zero-stakes snoozefest! Maybe, just maybe, this slice-of-life approach that the Hashira Training Arc is taking could work if Demon Slayer had a huge cast of well-developed characters to mine some compelling drama and fun interactions out of. Unfortunately, I'd argue that Tokito ranks among the better-supporting characters that we've gotten throughout the entire series, and he is, at his very best, just fine. He certainly didn't have enough charisma or interesting material to work with to carry so much of last season, though, so you can only imagine how much fun it is to have Tanjiro just sort of chill with him for a week to kill some time.

Oh, wait, I'm sorry; I've completely forgotten the most important plot point of the episode! Tokito can be a little harsh with the nameless redshirts that we're suddenly supposed to be concerned about, you see, and so Tanjiro challenges Tokito to a paper airplane contest to convince him to tone it down. This, of course, leads to… nothing. It's a paper airplane contest! That's it! I hope that seeing two dudes fold up some paper and chuck them around while laughing a lot is worth ten minutes of your precious and finite time on this Earth because that's what you get from Demon Slayer this week.

I think what bothers me the most about the way this season is being handled is that the show can't even be bothered to pretend that any of this training matters. Tanjiro has been blowing through all of his training regimen more-or-less off-screen—to the point where the show has made a joke about how little Tanjiro has to even try compared to the dozens of obviously doomed extras that make up most of the Corps ranks. Point of fact, the biggest laugh I got out of this whole episode was the ridiculously overproduced ten seconds of animation that we get when Tokito decides to interrupt Snake Guy and Wind Guy's sparring session—only for the rest of the fight to devolve into another piddly sight gag. It's like you can feel how desperately bored the crew at ufotable are with this paper-thin storyline—to the point that they will gussy up any scrap of action they can get their hands on, no matter how pointless it ends up.

That said, one of the things you learn in Teacher School is to nestle your criticisms into the middle of a complement “sandwich.” I already started with something positive, so here's one final kind word I can leave off with: This week marks yet another blissful seven days spent without a single frame of Zenitsu besmirching our screens. No matter how lame this filler storyline has been, so far, I have to constantly remind myself that it could be so much worse.

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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.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Hashira Training Arc is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.