#kaigaku still has to have his little villain arc

[2demon2slayer]

corruption

[hexyourheartablaze]

The way the actual villains of demon slayer are more interesting than tanjiro himself, even his own sister is. I genuinely wish we could get a spin off show showing everything from the demons point of view, the main character could be muzan.

Each arc could be him recruiting demons like kokushibo and akaza.

We could even have an arc following him and kokushibo hunting down slayers with the sun breathing technique and get an insight into their relationship.

We could see the day to day dealings of daki and douma.

There’s just so much potential in a spin-off

Honestly I wonder if a mini gaiden with the demons would be something we could get. I'm really nervous to say mini series out loud because I used to be really deep into the Naruto fandom and we got that Rock Lee spin off that was really bad. I don't think they would do that to the demons but still.

I'm less interested in Muzan's story arc just because he's a little bit dull as a villain. That sounds harsh, I really do enjoy him, but the whole point of Muzan is that he's lost his humanity and is so far gone that he only sees things from the most selfish point of view. I enjoy villains that make you say, "Oh shit, he has a point." and it makes you think harder on your own view points.

I would be really interested in seeing some filler with Akaza, Kokushibo, Douma, and Kaigaku. Maybe Nakime too, that would be nice. The background story would be cool but even some stuff not discussed in the manga would be fine.

[linkspooky]

Muzan and Tanjiro: Which one of us is the real demon?

Muzan and Tanjiro like most hero and villain foils are written to oppose each other as direct opposites. However, as a writer Gotouge intentionally wrote an insane amount of details to show how much these two deeply foil and reflect each other as opposites. Everything from their motivations, to the ideas the characters each represent all reflect opposite themes in the story. I’ll explore this idea in more detail under the cut. 

1. Empathy

Tanjiro’s central definiting trait is his empathy. Even though he’s fighting against literal demons, he sees every last demon he fights as a human in the end. While he does not forgive them and still condemns them for their actions, he still acknowledges that all of them were humans at one point and tries his best to respect their feelings. 

He makes men out of monsters in their final moments. In their final moment he tries to be respectful to their feelings and show them the empathy they were denied in life, saving them in what little way they can. This is exactly in reverse to the way Muzan appears in people’s lives. 

Muzan always shows up at the weakest moments of the people he takes advantage of. He shows up when Kaigaku fell into despair over his inability to surpass his brother, he showed up when Akaza fell into despair after losing everything. Muzan acts the opposite way of Tanjiro. While Tanrjio kills the demons but offers them humanity and empathy in their last fleeting moments of life, Muzan gives them another chance to live but completely strips them of their humanity. 

Tanjiro offers empathy and understanding to everyone he meets, Muzan offers it to nobody. You can see it in their reverse reactions to Yoriichi. 

Tanjiro understands that ultimately, Yorichii is a very melancholy person who just wanted to have a family, and a small amount of happiness but was again and again called to fight even though he hated it. He saw the human side behind the genius swordsman that was Yoriichi. 

Even though Yorichii failed to protect everything he wanted to protect, his wife and child, his own brother, even though he was expelled from the order of demon slayers Tanjiro wanted to tell him that his life was not a waste. To Tanjiro, every single individual life has worth. 

Muzan however, is only able to see Yoriichi as a monster. He only sees Yoriichi for his talent with the sword, breathing techniques, and nothing else. This is how Muzan sees people. He strips them down to their use. He could not care less about Yoriichi’s life story, the person he is. He sees the sword in his hand and nothing more. 

Muzan sees all of the upper moons as existing entirely for his sake. They are tools. He refuses to see them as individuals. He sees them as merely parts of his own body. He gets frustrated when they can’t perfectly carry out his orders. No matter what they do for him he’s never satisfied, because they can’t act truly like tools. 

Tanjiro will always see others as individuals with their own feelings and stories, whereas Muzan’s consists entirely of himself. That’s the central difference between them and that leads to the way they perceive themselves. 

2. A Man and a Monster

Tanjiro’s greatest priority will always be the lives of other people around him. Muzan’s greatest priority will always be his own life. This is why Tanjiro has to absolutely reject everything about how Muzan is. This confrontation at the beginning of their fight is very telling. 

Muzan sees nobody but himself as a person, and Muzan doesn’t even see himself as a person. He equates himself to a force of nature killing indiscrimminately. 

Muzan denies his own humanity and denies the humanity of his victim. It’s important to remember the position these two begin the story at. Muzan is the strongest being in existence. Stronger than even the one who invented all of the breathing techniques. So strong he can instantly regenerate no matter how much damage he takes. Muzan simply doesn’t need to see other people as people. He believes his strength puts him in a position fundamentally higher than him. He seems himself as a mindless force of nature, a being above others, basically a god. He’s the embodiment of might makes right. Fighting against him is pointless because he’s so strong he can trample on whoever he pleases. There’s no need for him to regard the feelings of whoever he’s trampled on. 

Tanjiro who sees the humanity in everybody has to reject someone who acts completely inhuman. It’s important to look at their arcs and where they both came from as well. Both Muzan and Tanjiro started from places of weakness. Tanjiro since the start of the story has been told that if he’s not strong he doesn’t get to decide anything. He has no rights. He has no choices. That his kindness will only ever be an obstacle to him, a weakness that gets in his way and makes him unnecessarily vulnerable. 

Tanjiro is a character who has to continually fight his own weakness and struggle against it, how useless he is, how he cannot help the people he wants to help. His arc has been finding strength without throwing away his kindness, or his humanity. 

Then we see Muzan who made the exact opposite choice of Tanjiro. They both come from similiar circumtsances. Tanjiro is the lone survivor of an attack that killed the rest of his family while he was away, and even if he was there he would have been completely powerless to help them. Muzan is someone who was so sickly he was going to die before he was twenty. They were both weak and had no control over their own fates. 

Tanjiro has always blamed himself for his own weakness, whereas Muzan from the start blamed others. His very first action is to kill the man who only tried to help him. 

They were both weak and powerless once. However, strength is something that Tanjiroearns slowly, while Muzan is given it on a silver platter. All Muzan had to do was drink a magic medicine and suddenly he was the strongest being on earth. Tanjiro is someone who had to continually struggle against himself in order to go stronger. 

Muzan, always, always, always, blames his problems on the other people around him. The key difference between the two characters is how they obtain their agency, that is how they accomplish what they want to do. How they make their choices have meaning. The unfair world states the weak have no choices and no rights, so how do they reclaim both of those for themselves. Muzan gains agency by stealing it away from others. 

Muzan thinks he should have the freedom to do whatever, because he lived most of his life sickly and always chained to a bed. His goal is always to preserve his own life at the cost of everybody else’s. That’s why he has absolutely no qualms at all at taking from others. 

Tanjiro is someone fundamentally who struggles to give to others. What he wants is to be able to do something that will matter to the others around him. Even their central goals are opposite. Tanjiro wants to return humanity to his sister. He’s spent his entire quest toiling for the survival of someone else to give them their humanity back. Muzan only wants to obtain something for himself that will make his survival more likely. Muzan from the start has only ever been concerned about his own survival, and only cares about continuing his life forever. 

That’s why Muzan can’t comprehend someone like Tanrjio, or Yoriichi. He thinks individual strength means that you protect yourself and your own life above everything else. Muzan’s actions are always about continuing his own fragile life, obtaining the perfect immortal body so no one can kill him, and nothing else. However, Yoriichi and Tanjiro are both people who give all of themselves to others. He cannot even begin to comprehend how they fight with no regards to their own lives. 

Muzan is someone who lives in constant fear of his own mortality. Despite being the most powerful being on earth, he’s always afraid, he’s always hiding himself, and he’s always alone. He’s a coward ultimately. The only way Muzan can feel safe is if he has the perfect immortal body that can never be hurt or harmed and therefore he will never have to die. Tanjiro however, is someone who keeps on fighting long after Muzan has declared him dead. Not for hismelf but for others. Therefore he is incomprehensible to the demon. It’s extreme selfishness vs extreme selflessness, it’s more about the ideas that each character represents as they clash rather than the characters themselves. 

Tanjiro carries heavy themes of existentialism. What gives his existence meaning is what he gives to the other people around him. Because he is able to have connections, even though he’s an individually small and very weak person his life feels like it meant something. Not only that but Tanjiro tries to give meaning to the lives of everybody he meets, no matter how small. He sees even small and weak people as people who’s deaths matter. Even people just quietly living their heads down matter to somebody. Tanjiro also sees himself as a part of the cycle with everybody. He admits that his own life is also small as well but even if he dies, he thinks the people he’s met so far will be able to continue without him. Tanjiro utlimately sees himself as a very normal person but states that normal people just living their lives have worth. 

Muzan sees everything as worthless. The demons take a very moral nihilism point of view. This is most embodied in Doma, but Muzan has shades of it too. The people who dead are dead. It ends there. There’s no meaning. Anyone can die at any time so why fuss over it? Tanjiro is trying to give worth to every individual little life he encouters, whereas Muzan is someone who strips away worth from everyone. And once again these are existentialist ideas. What is it that creates meaning in our lives? 

Muzan views himself as someone outside of the cycle. He’s a natural disaster. He’s a storm. He’s a special existence outside of everybody else. It’s exactly because he sees himself as special that he sees everything else as worthless in comparison to him. 

They also have completely opposite thematic ideas of mortality. Muzan sees death as the opposite of life. The absolute worst thing possible. His entire motivation is to avoid death in any way possible. Whereas, Tanjiro is someone who accepts his own mortality as a part of living. He knows full well that he may die. While he finds death to be a sad thing, rather than be terrified of it and spend his entire life running away from those feelings like Muzan he struggles to find a way to live on carrying the deaths of his comrades, the deaths of his family, and the knowledge that one day he will die because death is a natural part of his life. 

This is a theme that repeats itself in the series again and again. The demons extend their lives long past the time they were originally supposed to die, but depsite living for hundreds of lives they live mostly empty lives that amount to nothing more than prolonging their own lives. 

Whereas humans who are much weaker, much more fragile, who die much younger than the demons do end up living lives full of other people because they cared about something more than just trying to extend their own lives and live for themselves. 

The humans live short tragic lives, but they find a little bit of happiness from that. The demon lives long lives but they ultimately gain nothing from it in the end. Both humans and demons leave meaningless lives, but humans create their own meaning while demons just flaunt the meaninglessness of their own lives. They’re prolonging empty, miserable lives, devoid of all the things that make human life worth living. Muzan isn’t even a person, he’s just a void, there’s nothing in his life but himself. He’s strong but that’s all he is

Muzan is ultimately someone who’s strength does not matter because he only uses it for himself. Despite being the strongest person on earth, he’s undone by simple tricks. He’s defeated by people who are far weaker than him. He’s undone by his own power. 

Muzan’s last ditch move to save himself shows him for what he really is inside. He’s not a demon, he’s barely even a person. Because Muzan’s priority is always protecting himself and never letting others in he’s basically reduced to an infant. He’s egocentric like a child. His point of view is the only one that exists in the whole world. 

Which is why Muzan dies alone without a single ally in the world. It goes beyond the simple shonen idea of “the villain has no nakama power” Muzan literally doesn’t see other people as people. He’s so fundamentally unable to connect to other people in the way that Tanrjio does that he’s infantile and immature. He’s not a demon just a total failure of a person. 

[mysaldate]

About chapter 183...

Manga spoilers for KnY under the cut, just need to rant for a bit.

And so the time has come for KnY to fall down the rabbit hole so many other shonen series did. And it’s a damn shame. Up until the current arc, while there were a few slip-ups, Kimetsu no Yaiba was an amazing series that had cunning and powerful villains, realistic (within limits of man-eating demons and magical fighting styles) obstacles to overcome, one that paid attention to injuries of its characters and made a great deal about showing us the limits to human power.

HOWEVER

Ever since the Infinity train arc, something has been a little... different. The Infinity train arc was what started the very very annoying trend of downplaying a villain that was accidentally made too strong rather than actually dealing with his power and coming up with clever ways to overcome them. Enmu is estabilished early on as an excellent strategist. He came up with a way to use his blood demon art so subtly not even a demon slayer hashira suspected a thing, he made human lackeys since he knew the slayers would never kill a human and he even fused with the train to be  hard to kill. All of this is excellent set-up for what could be an incredibly interesting fight. Except... it was not. Because rather than having to work out his plan, Enmu simply... made a slip of tongue? Let Tanjiro in on his plan? And completely forgot about Nezuko and didn’t notice when the other slayers woke up? A character smart enough to come up with such an amazing and smart plan? Yeah, something is off.

And let me tell you, it did NOT get better overall.

There were minor highlights. The Red-light district arc was beautifully crafted and the fight was won on a relativelly reasonable conditions (except for Uzui being totally overpowered but that’s something less irritating than what they’re doing now). The fight with Hantengu and Gyokko had several Mary-Sue moments but no downplaying on the villains’ side. The Pillar Training arc had no major fight but it was a really good way to show the growth of our characters. Even in the current arc, there were good moments. The fight with Akaza was very satisfying and enjoyable even and the conclusion to it was perfect. Sadly, everything else about this arc is not.

The premise here, again, is outrageously good. Being trapped in the Infinity Fortress with Muzan and all his Upper Moons is a beautiful concept that could’ve made for SO. DAMN. MUCH. of interesting fights, character-building moments and terrifyingly epic power show-downs. And instead, it just rings hollow.

The main issue with this arc is how awfully downplayed Muzan and most of his demons were. The author suddenly decided to ignore a lot of what has been estabilished about Muzan, Nakime and their abilities in particular. Of course, Douma, Kaigaku and Kokushibou also got downplayed horribly but really, what pissed me off the most was Muzan and Nakime suddenly losing or forgetting about their abilities.

Look, I love KnY and I love the good side – or parts of it anyway. Tanjiro is a near perfect character, the first protagonist ever to actually pull me in and get me to cheer for him. Nezuko is, after Makai ouji’s Sitri, first character meant to be cute and actually striking me as such. I even came to like Inosuke to a certain extent. Yushiro and Tamayo were one of my favourites the moment they first walked on screen. The hashiras are a little wacky and I still think some of them are just completely unneccesary or wasted potential and I still find Zenitsu horribly cringy and annoying but if there ever was a series where I wanted the protagonist to achieve their goal, it’s this one. And that’s another reason why I’m so dissatisfied with what I’m getting.

And chapter 183 is exceptionally bad for such a huge multitude of reasons.

First of all, there’s Yushiro making up a plan against Nakime. Nakime, as we’ve been shown multiple times, knows of everything that happens in the Infinity Fortress. She can transfer people she doesn’t even see and she can send multiple people to various locations at once. Yet, Yushiro was somehow able to come up with a plan, share it with Mitsuri and actually go through with it, all without her noticing. At all. Because she suddenly turned blind for that one spot of the Fortress or something. And even if Yushiro used his illussionary ability, he still had to share the plan with Mitsuri. So there should be no way she wasn’t aware.

That’s another thing as well. As far as we are aware, it was Nakime’s job to keep the slayers separated. Again, she knows of everything happening in there. She knew about the other Upper Moons getting to a disadvantage. She knew about them being close to dying. And yet, she did nothing to get them away or to move the slayers out of their presence, she couldn’t move her hand and play a note on her biwa and just send them all anywhere else? Anyone else feeling cheated yet? Well buckle up because it gets even worse.

Because now we get to Muzan. And, yeah, remember the Demon Moons meetings? Remember that he can just snatch anyone’s head off, both lethally and non-lethally? Yeah, good thing you do because he doesn’t! Does this affect only demons? He still could’ve killed Yushiro ON THE SPOT. Does it only affect demons created by him? Still cool, he could’ve snatched Nakime’s head off without killing her and take Yushiro’s seal off her eye. But no, instead he’s not gonna do anything of that. He’s gonna mind-fight Yushiro inside her head and then he’s gonna kill her. And not even immediatelly kill like he killed Mukago or Kamanue or Rokuro, no, he will let her die slowly so Yushiro can keep using her power.

Remember when he pumped his blood into people by shoving a finger or a hand through their head? Well, good thing you do, because, yes you guessed it, HE DOESN’T. He scratched Tanjiro’s eye out and he that’s it. This is the demon who’s supposedly the most powerful demon EVER. And the most damage he’s done so far is scratch Tanjiro’s eye.

Remember when he could grab anyone from anywhere in the Fortress like he did with Wakuraba? Well, he doesn’t remember that either. He doesn’t NEED Nakime to access any place in the Fortress. He can get in and out as he pleases without needing her biwa AT ALL. He has more control over the place than Nakime herself. But guess what, we’re going to ignore all of that because if we actually stuck with the abilities estabilished for him, our heroes might need to think before they act and come up with clever plans and maybe there might even be some ACTUAL loss!

You know, not just a supporting character-type of loss! You know, like a loss of a character we really, whole-heartedly care about! A character we were given enough time to come to like and enjoy and support! A character we saw grow and get developed! How horrible!

Let it be known now that while the Infinity Fortress arc blessed me with countless (actually there’s somewhere below 500, I counted) pictures of my sweetheart Douma and gave me the TamaYushi angst I longed for, I still find it to be the worst arc KnY has had so far.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe all of this is a part of Muzan’s masterplan. Maybe he’s actually far more cunning and terrifying that we thought and we’re yet to see his true potential. But I seriously doubt that.

If anything like this is revealed, if we get to see any sort of reasoning for why nobody seems to have a brain anymore, I will gladly take this rant back and apologize but I kind of don’t feel like that will happen. This whole arc feels incredibly rushed and like the author just wants to be done with this series. It’s no longer the gem it was when it started and you can’t feel the love poured into every frame like it used to be. It’s just meeting the similar end as DGM.

How ironic that when I saw the first episode, my first initial thought was “Oh, this is just DGM for the new generation!” Now it seems KnY will meet the same fate, downplaying its villains, disregarding the rules it estabilished in its own universe, boring its creator and disappointing the more demanding parts of its audience.

To put it as simply as possible, there is no way the Demon Slayer Corps should be getting off this easily and there is no way Muzan and all his demons would be this stupid if they have already survived for long long centuries. Muzan doesn’t need Nakime and he doesn’t need his twelve demon Moons, he did just fine before he got them. So him suddenly forgetting about his powers and options is especially disheartening and irritating. At this point, we can only hope the creator realizes this and makes SOME effort to fix these mistakes otherwise, well, there goes another great series, ruined and corrupted by nothing but the bad writing and the author not knowing how to (or not bothering to, pick your favourite) make smart plans without disregarding their own characters’ abilities and parts of what makes them what they are. Muzan was written as an extremely powerful enemy, a cunning master of all things evil, a nightmare in human (or demon) form, something ancient and terrifying and able to spawn centuries of troubles for everyone around without ever – except for the one time – losing the upper hand. And that one time, he was STILL able to make it out alive and well.

Well, this was one extremely long rant and if you’ve read this far, kudos and a cookie to you. I may be expecting too much of a shonen series but am I really? Is it too much to ask for keeping some damn consistency at least in your characters if you can’t even be bothered to research for your timeline properly? The more I look into the Infinity Fortress arc, the more sudden plotholes and mistakes I find and the sadder it all gets. It’s like the author no longer has the strength to keep up the high quality series they started and if that’s actually the case, maybe a hiatus would be a better option than forcing themselves to continue and possibly ruin their entire franchise with a rushed and plothole-filled event.

On a slightly related note, you know what would be the one thing that would make me drop my jaw to the floor? A plottwist of unseen scale. Something on par with literally everything since the Infinity Train arc being STILL just a dream. Something on par with “Muzan” as he is now being actually the new Upper Five while the real Muzan stands back and enjoys the show. Something on par with this “Muzan” being just an illussion or a projection of something, or someone, who’s been in the Fortress this whole time while the real Muzan heads over to Urokodaki’s place to devour Nezuko. Or something even crazier. If you have any ideas, damn hit me with them, I want to hear all you have to say and feed this little flame of hope that this series is not yet entirely lost!