Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Swordsmith Village Arc

Episode 3

With Zenitsu out of the picture (for now), I'm honestly surprised at how fine I've been with Demon Slayer's decision to be shamelessly and exuberantly silly for a full quarter of a season. Don't get me wrong; all of the screaming and goofy-ass non-sequiturs have become positively exhausting at this point, but in the way that babysitting a bunch of rambunctious but well-meaning children for a few hours can be.

Look, call me an easy mark, but I laughed pretty hard when Kotetsu was just sitting there chucking pebbles at Haganezuka, and when Tanjiro was being just so, so dense about Genya not wanting anything to do with him. Like I said last week, I actually enjoy Demon Slayer's “Nicktoons, But With an Obscene Amount of Gore” sense of humor, so long as certain…blights upon humanity...are not present to shrivel my heart back down to Grinchy proportions.

Of course, the show is called “Demon Slayer,” so I knew we'd eventually have to commence with the demon slaying at some point. To the episode's credit, the new demon foes seem pretty all right, so far. Okay, so the weird Mouths for Eyes guy is probably my least favorite antagonist that the show has ever delivered so far, and I was really not feeling Old Demon Guy with a Giant Lump on His Head, but then ODGwaGLoHH's eviscerated body split up into a pair of sexy demon twins, who then proceeded to get blasted in half by Genya's sawed-off shotgun (which friggin' owns) to become a pair of sexy demon quadruplets who absolutely wreck shit with their Upper Rank capabilities. That's pretty neat, I have to say.

The general problem of this season remains, though, which is that this arc feels like it has even less in the way of emotional stakes than the last couple of seasons, so I can only be so entertained by all of the flashy stuff happening on screen before I realize that I still don't especially care about anything that is happening. Maybe that will change before too long, or maybe I'll feel just as detached as ever. We'll still probably get to watch Genya go all Doom Slayer on a bunch of demons with his shotty, though, so I guess I'll stick around to, you know, see more of that. Twist my arm, why don't you?

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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 Swordsmith Village Arc is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.