Spring has really crept up on me.  It’s a function of there being so many bubble series – that’s the theme here, and it’s largely representative of the broad direction anime has been headed for several years.  There aren’t as many great shows, and lots of OK to pretty good ones, and this season even more so than most.  I’d prefer winter given a choice – give me fewer series in the murky middle and one or two elites at the top any day of the week.  But we get what we get.

In a roundabout way that’s an admission that I’m getting close to a forced decision point on Kimetsu no Yaiba.  As far as bubble shows this season goes, this is certainly better than most in terms of (as) objective (as I can get) quality, but maybe not in terms of “blogability”.  It’s a pretty straightforward, by-the-numbers WSJ action-fantasy series – not much subtlety or subtext to it. It does what it does very well indeed (as this episode illustrated) and doesn’t fuss too much with trying anything else.  Will I be watching?  Absolutely, unless something changes for the worse in a big way.  Will I be blogging?  That’s a much tougher call.

That stipulated, I did enjoy this ep a lot more than last week’s.  Just a good, solid action ride from bell to bell, with terrific animation and choreography and some lovely special effects.  The primary colors writing style is refreshing in the sense that one never has to guess what’s happening here – watching Kimetsu is kind of relaxing in that way.  This week was all about the final selection process, and as such mostly about Urokodani – as the reveals pretty much all concerned him.

Urokodani definitely showed his human side this time around a lot more than he has.  He admits to Tanjirou that he’d never intended to allow him to take the final selection (which is why he chose what he thought was an insurmountable task), because he “doesn’t want to see any more children die”.  It’s easy to coast past that line as a general shounen platitude, but it turns out to have real immediacy to it when Tanjirou arrives for the selection.  The mountainside is covered in wisteria, which not only gives us a really lovely background but turns out to be critical because youkai are weak against it, trapping them on the mountaintop.  If this is a real thing in Shinto mythology it’s news to me, by the way – I’ve never heard of youkai being afraid of wisteria before.

The summit zone is full of demons who’ve been captured alive and left there, presumably for use in just this ritual.  They’re hungry and ill-tempered, which makes this a stern test.  And one such demon has managed to survive on the mountain for 47 years after having been imprisoned there by Urokodani, and in the process has eaten 13 of his disciples in various final selections (thus, Urokodani’s aside to Tanjirou).  That includes the siblings that Tanjirou trained with last week, who were as expected already dead.  This fellow is also rather steamed at having missed out on an era change, which was rather a timely reference I thought.

The battle between the youkai and Tanjirou, with the “water-breathing” effects and the threads and the way his cutting strikes were animated, was really quite splendid.  ufotable can really do some fine work as long as you keep them away from charity auctions, and it’s interesting to see them do a pure action show where they’re keeping the use of CGI relatively restrained.  If you’re a fan of the sort of stunning combat scenes we got in the likes of Hunter X Hunter 2011 and One Punch Man S1, Kimetsu no Yaiba is probably the best thing going to tide you over until HeroAca returns in the fall (which is a shame for OPM fans, but never mind).  Next week finally sees the arrival of the sidekick character, so we’ll see how that impacts the appeal of the non-action side of the series.