Kimetsu no Yaiba S3 – 5 [Bright Red Sword]

Welcome all, to another episode of Kimetsu no Yaiba! This week is same as last week, as well as the week before: Combat! Lots… of combat. Some of it is good! Other bits not so much. What do I mean? Well lets dive into the episode and find out!

So the cool action. It exists! Unsurprisingly, Yaiba has a couple of pretty fun action sequences. There’s a combo move, Kanroji shows up and kills some demons, it’s a good time. Yet for some reason… I can’t help but feel like there’s less hype, less “Wow” factor, then Season 2. And I think it boils down to the location. The entertainment district was bright and colorful. It lent a sense of spectacle and hype to an already bright and colorful action sequence. Season 3 however takes place in a forest. A dark, ominous forest, with a sense of foreboding and danger. Yeah the atmosphere is more tense then Season 2, that’s true. But Yaiba isn’t a series that uses tense very well I feel. It’s a battle shounen, we aren’t going to be afraid. And it’s this difference in location that I think makes the action feel… not as fun?

Of course the issue might also be the villains. Daki and Gyutarou had a sense of style and spectacle to them. The Upper Four does as well, with his 4 personalities! But the Upper Five… He doesn’t come across as very charismatic. Rather he feels very one-note, excessively evil. Tormenting people for his “art”, causing pain and laughing at it, drenching himself in blood. There’s no much nuance to him I feel. Compare that to the dude who splits into 4, separating his emotions along with them. There’s a lot of stories, such as loneliness or emotional suppression, that you build off of this. Something to really sell the pitiful narrative we’ve generally gotten from demons. It’s not like the Upper Five is useless of course, he sort of works to bring out Tokito’s story, which is definitely the most engaging part of that fight. But it’s not enough.

Moving on to the rest of the cast, Kanroji appears! And she’s kind of ridiculous. In a fun way. Her sword makes no sense, and I still think her pink and green color palette is just ugly as sin. But her fighting style is flashy, and I think Yaiba can do some fun stuff there. The only issue I really have with her is how Yaiba immediately uses her for some boob and ecchi jokes. Zooming in on her tits as they jump around, having the old man and other swordsmith want to lay their heads in her lap, all despite there being a shit ton of demons attacking the village. It just feels… out of place to me. Like Zenitsu, there’s a time and a place for these sorts of jokes. And in the middle of your primary conflict/character introduction isn’t one of them.

Enough with the negativity though, there is something I really liked this week: Tanjiro and Nezuko’s combo attack. This was just cool, and it was something I actually think the forest location really accentuated. The darkness and foreboding of the misty forest really made the bright colors of the blood flame sword stand out. It was a splash of color in the darkness. And the siblings working together was just cool. They couldn’t win on their own, Tanjiro unable to seriously injure the Upper Four and Nezuko lacking the skills to fight all 4 on her own. So Nezuko, not Tanjiro which I like that she’s starting to get some more agency, came up with the idea to coat his sword in her flaming blood. And it was baller! Give me more of this and less flopping titty jokes

On to of that, we also got more latent memories about the Upper One. While the latent memory thing is stupid, I like getting this history. The knowledge that he used to fight Muzan, and was actually someone Muzan feared. The red scar, the similar blades, Tanjiro is walking the same path he did. How he no doubt inevitably fell to the temptation of being a demon, like Akaza offered to Rengoku, something Tanjiro himself will refuse in the final confrontation showing how they are different. There’s a lot of cool things going on here, and I really like it. Yaiba has kind of been slipping these last 2 seasons with fleshing Muzan out, doing so primarily through his interactions with his underlings. And while that’s cool, for this guy to be an effective final villain we need more then his silky smooth voice in the background. So yeah, more of this please.

Finally lets talk about Genya. I was right! He is fucked up, and does have a reason for not dying. That reason being that he’s… part demon? I will admit, I’m curious how this works. He can’t be a full demon, as he’d burn in the sunlight and people would be a lot less surprised at Nezuko if they had already let him in. So he has to be at least part human. But then the question becomes, how? Is he the child of a demon/human romance? Did he just drink a smaller amount of blood? Is there some 3rd option? Yaiba has a pretty cool opportunity here with Genya, and I hope it does something good with it.

So yeah, all in all this was a pretty standard episode of Kimetsu no Yaiba. Some action, some lackluster character stuff, some hype. I’m still undecided on if it’s better or worse then Season 2, but we still have half a season to go so I’m in no rush to make that judgement. At the very least we’re starting to get some more history, such as the Upper One’s past as a swordsman and Muzan before he was this all-powerful demon lord. That’s enough to tide me over for this week and mark me as satisfied. Hopefully Yaiba can do it again for the next few episodes.