Welcome all, to another week of Kimetsu no Yaiba! This is… I won’t lie, this is a rough week for the series. There won’t be a lot of positivity in this post. But after last week I’m sure you anticipated that. So without further ado, lets dive in!
Getting right to it, this week was… Not good. Before even getting into the actual content, the episodes very structure was just terrible. Most of it was this slow-paced flashback, completely annihilating any kind of tension or pacing in an otherwise action-filled arc. This isn’t uncommon for Yaiba, it does this with basically every villain, following the exact same structure. But this one felt particularly egregious as it added so very little to the episode. It didn’t even manage to have any of Yaiba’s trademark flashy after effects! Instead it was filled with blurry rain, poor CGI forests and just kind of dull scenery compared to everything else we’ve seen. It honestly felt like a waste of 15 minutes. And the worst part? The actual content of the flashback wasn’t very good to begin with!
Why do I say the content isn’t very good? Well to be frank, this is perhaps the most cookie cutter basic bitch flashback I’ve seen in a long time. Parents dying in a tragic accident? Check. Random sibling that was never hinted at before and wasn’t even present at the start of the flashback? Check. Sibling is a misunderstood asshole that is meant to be redeemed at the end showing they were a decent person who cared the whole time despite never showing it? Check. Had you asked me to come up with a more trite and tropey flashback, I don’t think I could have. Maybe replace the sibling with a childhood romance, I don’t know. The point is, nothing about this flashback really sold me on Tokito. In fact I care more for his relationship with his prior swordsmith then I do his family and brother.
It’s sad, because Yaiba could have made this work. Maybe space it out more, have Tokito see flashes of it mid-fight against the Upper Five. He could have relived his fight against the demon that broke into his house, the one he blacked out during, here and used that as the slow build up and justification for his power spike. Think the Kakashi vs Obito, a fight I personally believe to be one of the best Naruto has ever made. It would simultaneously keep the pacing of the scene while really selling Tokito’s slow breaking of his amnesia. I don’t know, maybe I’m just asking for to much from Yaiba. But I really feel like the series could be so much better if it would break from these basic, dull story beats.
As for the rest of the episode, the actual little bit of fighting we did get, it was fine. Nothing particularly memorable. Sadly I don’t think Tokito’s Mist Breathing really lends itself well to flashy visual sequences. It has a few moments, mostly the still frames. But the actual mist effect, and his movement through it, kind of just looks like a mess with Yaiba’s after-effects heavy style. Easily the prettiest part of the episode for me though was just Tokito reminiscing about Mr. Tetsuido, his original sword smith. The way his blade shined in the moonlight as he handled it with more care then he ever had before. It’s a bit sad, really. That such a small, final moment had more of an emotional impact then the other 20 minutes of the episode combined.
So yeah, all in all I found Yaiba pretty disappointing this week. Everything form the production to the narrative just felt lacking. Part of this is because Yaiba likes to take a single fight and drag it out across an entire season, something it probably shouldn’t be doing. But it’s not like Yaiba can’t make that work. It managed it back in Season 2 with the siblings after all! It’s more like it doesn’t have any kind of cohesive core theme to the arc. Like it’s more of a “This is a cool setting for a fight, this is a cool power, lets fit them together”. That’s fine I suppose, sometimes you just want to some action. But it doesn’t make for a particularly memorable, nor emotionally effecting, story. The kind of story that really sticks with you once it’s over.
