Welcome all, to the double-length grand finale for Season 3 of Kimetsu no Yaiba! With double the runtime we have a fair amount to talk about this week, so lets jump right in!
Starting off my immediate question is: Did this need to be double length? Did it really? Personally, I would say no. Cut out a lot of the more useless flashbacks, the last minute tricks, the extended back and forth’s, this could easily have been a single episode. The only reason to make this a double feature is to add a bit of weight. That said, as far as endings go… This ain’t bad. In fact it’s better then I was expecting. We got a nice visual/setting change as the sun came up, a shocking amount of legitimately emotional gravitas, the first in the season, and some actually decent comedy. As far as endings go, this is more then the season deserved. At least until Yaiba managed to shoot itself in the foot. Again.
What do I mean? Well simply put, I mean Nezuko. Yaiba had this absolutely fantastic setup for the finale. Tanjiro has to choose between saving some civilians and saving his sister. And you know what? He was “failing” that moral challenge, at least in his eyes. He was choosing his sister. And that was awesome! This could have been something he would have to live with and work through until the end of the story, would have had to bear that weight of his decision for the rest of the show. It’s not like the demon was safe, it was still a morning sun. The guy was dead, either by that or someone else. And then… Nezuko kicks him away, sending him to help the civilians. Forcing him to leave her to her fate and save those people from the demon.
And this was still awesome! Imagine if Nezuko got severely hurt, or even maybe died, from this. This could also have been something Tanjiro would have had to carry, this idea that he had failed her in some way even if she never held it against him. Yaiba had so many options to make this work. And it ended up picking the most basic, boring, expected outcome of them all… That Nezuko is perfectly fine, untouched by the sun and this special snowflake immune to the single greatest weakness demons have always had. It completely destroys whatever consequences the scene may have had, taken the tension of the finale and tossed it to the wind. I’m not asking for Nezuko as a character to have died! I just want some god damn consequences for killing the… 5th most powerful demon by rank in the country!
Luckily despite this Yaiba did give me one thing I quite liked out of this in Muzan. In the span of a minute this guy manages to take over the season and be more threatening then both of the Upper Moons combined. Which considering he is their boss, and the big bad of the show, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. He should be memorable. I just wish his minions to were to. Anyways, as much as I don’t like this special snowflake reveal for Nezuko, I think Muzan’s reaction to it is good. It gives him a reason to be proactive in attacking our leads, and it really puts into perspective just how much he hates his creations yet why he still continues to make them. Makes you wonder if maybe some demons might turn on him if they happen to learn any of this, huh?
Anyways, all in all I found this to be an… interesting, unexpected, but ultimately disappointing, finale to the season. It is simultaneously better then what Yaiba deserves yet still a letdown. Maybe it’s because there is a clear kernel of potential in it. A sign that, had things gone differently, Yaiba could have done something really special with this finale. Made it stand out. But that’s kind of the story with Yaiba as a whole. It has all these great ideas, from setting a fight in a sword smiths village while our hero doesn’t have a weapon to the moral quandary of who to save. It just never manages to do anything with them. And the further we get into the series, the more it’s happening. Suffice to say, I’m not entirely sure I even want to watch the next season.
That was fast! Personally, I always expected Nezuko to live: it doesn’t fit the tone of the series for her to die, and it would force massive changes in the status quo (Tanjiro’s main motivation for fighting Muzan would be undermined, and he’d presumably need to spend quite a bit of time to recover psychologically), and Demon Slayer has always taken the safe path so far. So I basically spent the entire sequence wondering how Nezuko was going to survive this, and … in the end they chose the simplest solution possible, haha. I agree it would have been far more interesting if she had died, but this isn’t that kind of show.
(By the way, knowing that Nezuko can withstand the sun, and will probably recover her remaining faculties as well in time, you could argue that she’d be better off just staying a demon. I mean, she’s healthy, strong, doesn’t age, and essentially immortal! It has its downsides too, of course (being different from everyone else – unless the world goes full transhumanism – and not being able to have children), but still, immortality is a pretty tantalizing prospect. The series is much more likely to return her to a human and burn everything demon-related, of course, but still, the science involved could potentially revolutionize society.)
Anyway, overall I thought the finale was pretty fun. Yes, it was probably a bit longer than it should have been (though I liked that the Fourth Rank for once did not have a tragic backstory – he was just an asshole who constantly hurt others while believing himself to be a victim), there were a lot of asspulls (Nezuko aside, Tanjiro suddenly copying Zenitsu was a bit too convenient as well), and some plot points were resolved unsatisfactorily (the ancient sword turned out to just be somewhat sharper than usual, Kanroji was basically ignored, and I still find the Fourth Rank really unimpressive for a demon ranked as high as he was). But overall, it was quite fun, and the big, climactic moments mostly delivered.
The next arc that has been announced apparently only has 9 chapters, so I’m not sure how they’re going to make a season out of that… An OVA would make more sense, to sate people’s appetite until the fourth season is done. Or maybe they’ll adapt some parts of the following arc too. In any case, this was supposed to be one of the weakest arcs of Demon Slayer, and the next major arc (after the Hashira training mini-arc) is supposed to be much better. So I’ll probably stick with it for now: from what we’ve seen of them, the remaining Upper Ranks seem to be a lot more compelling, and I can live with the series’ predictability as long as it continues to look as good as it does and the pacing issue is fixed.
I hate predictability and the constant need yo stay in the fucking status quo. Chainsaw-man breaks the rules and isn’t slave 2 any stupid status quo. Shonen writers like DS can learn a thing from Fujimoto.
Yes, I’d also prefer it if Demon Slayer had a bit more complexity to it. But I still enjoy it for what it is (although this season had some major issues): simple, easily digestible popcorn entertainment, with lots of exciting fight scenes, a likable MC and outstanding production values, that rarely leaves a lasting impression but that is, at its best, very enjoyable from moment to moment – or light show to light show, if you prefer. In fact, I personally prefer it to Chainsaw Man. Sure, the latter is less formulaic, and the characters are more complex, but the cast (and the MC in particular) is less sympathetic, the humor is rather juvenile and too omnipresent to easily ignore, the fight scenes are fun but typically quite shallow, and the animation is far inferior. I like it as well, but it has its own problems, and I wouldn’t want all series to follow its example.
Denji is actually very sympathetic dude!!! Even unlikeable jerjs like Power and Aki actually have some vulnerability and sympathetic moments if you lokk at their backstories and what happens later on. The humour isn’t always juvenile and frankly This series touched topics most other shonen wouldn’t touch but you haven’t read the manga so I can understand why you think that way. But CSM is not bloody shallow.
I mean, Denji is a controversial MC for a reason. I agree that he has his likable features, but his main motivation for joining Makima was essentially to get laid, and that ‘pervertedness’ is a big part of his character. And he’s brash and loud and naive and those are all things that not everyone is going to like. I know his character is more complicated than it seems at first (with sexual desire being a substitute for a deep need to be loved and stuff), but still, I never liked him much. On the other hand, Tanjiro is super nice and empathetic, hard-working, and mainly motivated by a desire to help his sister and just … be good. He’s a bit boring, maybe, but he’s very easy to like.
I did actually read the manga (though only the first part, so I’m not sure how Denji changes later), and I agree that the series touches on some interesting questions, and certainly has much more to offer than Demon Slayer in terms of character development (and the lack of plot armor in the closing parts is great). So I agree the series as a whole isn’t shallow. But I was only talking about the fights, which can be quite fun in all their gory mess, but I was rarely emotionally invested in them (except maybe the final arc, but I don’t remember there being much of a fight, though there might have been) the way I am in the best parts of Demon Slayer. Hence the ‘shallow’: the fights are fun, but none of them really stuck with me.
As for the humor … I’d probably have loved it in high school, maybe early university, but at this point in my life I’m not nearly as fond of seeing people throw up into each other’s mouths. Humor is very subjective though (for some reason I do like Grand Blue, even though its sense of humor is quite similar – but I’m not gonna dissect that), so I don’t hold that against the series or anything. I just don’t like it. I also don’t like the humor in Demon Slayer, but it’s easier to ignore.
But it did break the status quo. Muzan go from want to get rid of them to now wanting to capture Nezuko and eat her to gain her sun immunity. The demon slayers now have to protect Nezuko at all cost while gaining a juicy bait for Muzan.
Just because you break the rules doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
It made the story a bit less boring though
I suspect a 3-4 episode mini-series covering the Hashira Training arc that will segue to season 4 proper via cliffhanger (probably chapter 139). The show is running into the same perils that affect other four-quadrant franchises, in trying to balance its mass appeal with just trying to tell good stories and fight scenes, and I hope that the feedback will be taken into consideration to improve. There’s significantly more competition on the sakuga side now, and this series needs to adapt to these changing currents or else all of that goodwill it built since 2019 is about to wither away.