Read my first impressions Here!
Note: This post contains spoilers through episode 5 of the series.
Demon Slayer was an anime I was anxious to get back to primarily for reasons of its particular aesthetics. I’m more than willing to discuss plot lines and symbolism all day long, but I’m certainly not above enjoying an anime for its awesome animation and exciting fight scenes. So far, the series is definitely delivering on that front. What surprised me, though, is that its emotional intelligence has also managed to strike a chord with me.
The primary arc of this group of episodes follows Tanjiro’s training as a prospective demon slayer. He reveals himself to be an emotionally sensitive person when he’s unable to perform the killing blow on a demon he and his sister Nezuko encounter. He then begins training in earnest with a man named Urokodaki, who has a long history as a demon slayer. As one might expect, it takes a while for Tanjiro to adjust to the intensity of the training; in fact, the time period these episodes straddle is close to two years by the time Tanjiro is ready to take on his own assignments. Tanjiro also undergoes a “final exam” of sorts, where his task is to survive a week in a forest full of captive demons (and of course they’re holding grudges against anyone and everyone because they’ve had their freedom of movement taken away). Unsurprisingly, Tanjiro survives the test, even taking down an incredibly grotesque, long-lived demon who harbors a particular hatred toward his own master.
I’d admittedly been a little ho-hum on some of the character and plot elements of the series to this point. I’m not sure if it was the pacing of the events themselves or just the adaptation reflecting the fact that sometimes authors don’t always have a clear picture of their characters’ motivations right at the outset of every story they create. But as Tanjiro defeated the many-armed demon that had plagued his master’s students for decades, I suddenly had the feeling of knowing just what the protagonist was “about.”
While I typically like to celebrate the great girls and women who inhabit my favorite anime productions, I have to confess that one of my favorite character “types” are boys and young men who exhibit kindness and emotional vulnerability as a facet of their personalities (a counter-point to the vengeful, hot-headed character archetype that exists unquestioned in many other series). Tanjiro fits nicely into this category, as it’s evident from early on that he’s a bit of a softy. His peers see this as a weakness, because it tends to make him indecisive and unwilling to kill when he needs to. But I suspect that this aspect of his personality will ultimately become one of his greatest strengths.
Tanjiro is the one character thus far who seems willing to understand and acknowledge the humanity of the demons. While the demons feast on the flesh and blood of human beings, they also are human beings who, by some unfortunate turn, have been cursed to forget themselves and their former existence. Not only does Tanjiro want to believe in the basic humanity of each of the demons he faces, he almost has to; it’s the only way that he can continue to nurture the belief that there may be a mechanism in the world to restore his sister’s personality and humanity to her. Even the many-armed demon, a rancid creature that has nursed its hatred for forty-seven long years, ends up at the receiving end of Tanjiro’s compassion; as its body dissipates into ash, Tanjiro holds its hand to the last.
I found this to be incredibly moving. Where in many other series, the hero would be boisterous about his ultimate victory, Tanjiro’s actions and choices represent a different kind of victory, winning out over needless hatred. The series compounds this by sharing several flashbacks to the time prior to the enemy’s demon transformation, thus humanizing him even further. It would be easy to turn this fight into a throwaway victory, but instead it becomes a moment that speaks of its protagonist’s character in the best possible way.
I think maybe the point the series might be trying to emphasize is that human beings tend to fear what they don’t understand. The protagonist of this story has both a vested interest in understanding, as well as a temperament that provides for the possibility in the first place. I think it might be easy to get lost in the show’s beautiful wood-etched look or its gorgeous action animation and overlook the unusually elegant heart at its center. I hope that subsequent episodes and story arcs are willing to keep exploring this.
Really the only nagging issue I’ve had with the show thus far is that as cute as Nezuko is, aspects of her character bother me. One of my pet peeves is when female characters are, through some means, not allowed a voice (figurative or otherwise). Nezuko is muzzled because it keeps her from attacking and eating other humans, but this also means that what we know of her comes to us through flashbacks (which isn’t a huge issue to me), and through her body language and actions. Though she gets some active things to do in the second episode (literally kicking a demon’s head off its body like a soccer ball), throughout the next few episodes she’s incapacitated, literally sleeping for months to replenish her strength. While this allows Tanjiro to step to the forefront for what turn out to be several important episodes related to his own development, I worry that the mechanism by which Nezuko regains her strength through sleep will necessitate other periods of inactivity and other excuses to push her own story to the wayside.
Honestly, though, this has overall been a pleasant surprise so far. I hope the series can keep building on its strengths as a fairly unique supernatural shounen adventure.
Irina has an interesting post on the role of wisteria flowers in these episodes. Check it out!