Demon Slayer season 2 makes some odd decisions

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Conor Evans
December 13, 2021
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Back when the anime was first airing, Demon Slayer was the hottest anime. Regardless of where in the world you were, be it Japan, the US, UK — everywhere was talking about Demon Slayer. It took the world by storm and blew everyone away with its incredible art style and animation — if by some odd chance you didn’t know Ufotable before, you know them after this.

With all that being said, the new season has been extremely disappointing, so far as I’m concerned. It’s a bizarre situation that the series has found itself in, but I want to go over some of my thoughts and feelings about this rather odd start, and ponder how the second season of a show that should have blown us away has ended.

Demon Slayer season 2

After the conclusion of Demon Slayer season 1, I quickly rushed over to the manga where I proceeded to marathon through everything and catch up to date. Before I knew it I was all caught up with the weekly releases, and we were fast approaching the end of the series.

I’m sure you all remember the announcement of the movie at the end of the first season — and if any of you also decided to pick up the manga, you’ll probably agree with me in thinking that it made some sense for them to do the Mugen Train arc as a film. The arc was only about 15 chapters long and could definitely be contained within the hour and a half timeframe of a film.

We then found out that the first seven episodes of season 2 were going to be replaying the events of the film, but cut down into episode-size chunks. I wrote an article and gave some of my initial thoughts on the decision they made — saying that maybe they wanted to capitalise on the popularity of Rengoku, that maybe we would get an even more story-rich version of the arc, and that ultimately would tell as to whether that was what we would get.

Fast forward to now and we are well past the “series” version of the Mugen train arc — all I can say is that they started with an episode focusing on Rengoku and his eating habits, and then just pretty much cut up the movie into 20-minute segments and gave us that. I don’t really know what I was expecting, considering that the movie broke box office records in Japan, I thought maybe we were going to get something a bit… more?

1 hour special to kick off the next arc!

This didn’t matter though, because the series was all going to make up for it with the upcoming 1 hour-long episode that was going to send our heroes on their next adventure. Following the Hashira of sound, Tengen Uzui, we would be heading towards the arc we’ve all been patiently waiting for, the Entertainment District arc.

I was really hoping that this special was going to get us deep into the next arc so that by the time we were back to watching our usual 20-minute episodes, we would be hitting the ground running. Instead, the 1 hour special focused mainly on the aftermath of the Mugen Train arc. Now, I want to say that it’s not the content I have a problem with — it does a lot for building up some of the side characters of the series and also has a nice “passing of the torch” moment for our main man Tanjiro. However, this content could have been contained within a normal episode rather than as part of an hour-long special.

All in all, I’m just left confused as to why we even got this special extra-long episode. It didn’t do anything to add to the end of Mugen Train and it barely even got us started on the following arc — we hardly even got introduced to the new Hashira member our main characters will be going along with. I had previously thought maybe there was some solid reasoning behind their choices up to this point, but I realise now I was just being optimistic.

Now I feel like half of my experience has been soured — and even though I’m certain the upcoming Entertainment District arc will give us some amazing scenes, I will still be left irritated as to why we couldn’t have had more of the new content rather than the inexplicable rehashes we’ve seen to date.

What do you think of Demon Slayer season 2 so far?

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