Hashira Training Arc: A Video Game-like Experience
Demon Slayer’s recently concluded Hashira Training Arc feels very much like a video game – specifically, the parts of an RPG where you go around your camp talking to every companion hoping they say something interesting, knowing that most of them will just spout some generic dialogue then walk away. This is not to say that downtime before the grand finale is a bad thing, but Hashira Training Arc is so poorly executed that it made me long for the overly long and meandering fight scenes from Season 3.
A big part of the appeal of Koyoharu Gotoge’s Demon Slayer comic was that it’s was a pretty short shonen manga with a brisk pace that prioritized getting straight to the big moments. While Ufotable’s adaptation of Demon Slayer has used animation to turn short and otherwise unremarkable events into epic displays of gorgeous visuals, it has become clear that the show is capable of little less. Last season, it was padding the runtime with lengthy fight scenes full of VFX and erratic camera movements that made it hard to follow the action. This season, with a conclusion on the horizon (consisting of not one, but three feature films), Ufotable stretched out the calm before the storm rather than confining it to a short training montage at the beginning of their epic action movie.
Diving Deep into Hashira Training
This isn’t bad, in theory, as Hashira Training Arc lets the audience spend more time with the titular Hashira, the pinnacle of the Demon Slayer Corps, before they likely fall like flies during the next arc. Except that’s not exactly what happens, as we don’t really learn much about any Hashira – with two notable exceptions. The episode devoted to Himejima the Stone Hashira at least offers a dramatic flashback – even if the show’s use of flashbacks is painfully formulaic and predictable – while Giyu’s flashback connects to the first season in an interesting way, bringing back one of the show’s earliest tragic characters, Sabito. But the majority of the season is devoted to an endless cycle of training montages between Tanjiro and the Hashira, most of whom remain as one-note as their breathing technique. And this is without even getting to the dumb and unnecessary mini-quests that Tanjiro embarks upon in an effort to lift the spirits of the Hashira, like challenging Tokito to a paper airplane contest so he’d be nicer to the other recruits. Dedicating half an episode to two guys folding paper and throwing an airplane in the air should be a sign that you’re going too far.
If Demon Slayer actually had a large ensemble of fleshed-out characters, this slice-of-life approach might be interesting. One could picture a world where Jujutsu Kaisen should have done something similar between Seasons 1 and 2, before all the supporting cast died. But because the show never put in that effort for anyone not named Tanjiro – and if it did, then it immediately killed those characters off – the Hashira Training Arc appears as too little, too late.
The Neglect of Nezuko
It’s especially painful when the one character who should be getting some attention and dimension is nowhere to be seen. In the premiere, we learn that the Demon Slayer Corps is doing this emergency training camp because Nezuko unlocked a special ability that makes her a target to every demon in the world. Yet Nezuko only shows up in that episode, and she literally gets seven words of dialogue in it – most of which are part of a joke. For four seasons, we’ve been led to believe Nezuko is important, yet Demon Slayer throws away any chance it gets to actually show us why, or to make us care about this character. Sure, maybe that’s how it goes in the manga. But if fidelity to the source material is what the show strives for, then why did we need to extend 11 chapters into almost 10 hours of television — 10 minutes of which (not to keep beating a dead horse) were a paper-airplane contest?
Then there’s the finale, in which we finally see the show’s big bad, Muzan Kibutsuji, do something for once. It’s not a fight, or something actually cool. Instead, there’s an extended sequence of Muzan “Smooth Criminal”-ing his way to the house of the Demon Slayer Corps leader, in one of the most self-indulgent and pointless scenes to be animated this year. Sure, it looks spectacular, and it’s a testament to Ufotable that they can turn a scene of a dude walking painfully slowly into something exciting. But it’s also proof of Demon Slayer trying too hard to recreate its initial success, fulfilling the unreasonable expectation that every inconsequential panel from the manga will be transformed into an extended display of awesome animation. By comparison, the scene in the finale where Muzan gets blown to hell and slowly regenerates only to be impaled by several blood spears while his head explodes is not only gruesome and horrifying, but looks much better than anything else this season. And that’s the problem with Hashira Training Arc. There are some genuinely good moments, even in the training sequences — the entire waterfall training with Inosuke almost drowning is hilarious — but they’re overwhelmed by endless padding.