There was a distinct subtle as a sledgehammer quality to this week’s episode of Kimetsu no Yaiba.  Wall to wall battle, with no interruptions and a couple of recycled sequences – stock shounen, albeit executed very well.  The previous couple of eps were more about highlighting the ways in which this series is a bit distinct from shounen templates, but this put us more in the mode of earlier ones, where the feeling was more of seeing some we’d seen done countless times before, albeit done very well.

The two demons we met last week do have names besides Fukayama and Komatsu – the guy with eyes wide shut is Yahaba, and the girl with the temari is Susamaru.  They’re part of the “Twelve Demon Moons” – a term we haven’t used before, referring to an inner circle of Kibutsuji’s faction apparently.  They means their blood is made to order for Tamayo’s request from last week, and I suppose it means Kibutsuji is going to be rather pissed when they end up dead at Tanjirou’s hand (which I was expecting to happen here, but will almost surely happen next week).

Apart from that, it was pretty much all fighting.  There was an awful lot of CGI used here, which planted two somewhat contradictory thoughts in my head – first, that ufotable is really good at CG and second, that it would have been cool to see somebody like Bones animate this fight by hand.  Good CGI is much better than bad (read, 90% of what we see in anime) CGI, but good 2-D animation is still aesthetically far superior to me.  Even as seamless as ufotable integration is, the cuts between the two were still unmissable here – there’s only so much you can do to hide them.

As to the fight, there’s plenty of blood and guts – Yushiro’s head gets lopped clean off by a temari in true “Black Knight” fashion, it’s only a flesh wound for him.  Indeed, once he recovers he lends Tanjirou his powers of seeing so he can spot the arrows Yahaba is using to control the temari.  He also suggests to Tamayo that the two of them use Tanjirou and Nezuko as a distraction and flee but immediately withers under her reaction (this is the best moment of the episode).  He makes it clear to Tanjirou that it’s Yahaba that’s the true threat between these two enemies, and the one that needs to be addressed first.

Also of note – when Nezuko gets her foot taken off by one of the temari, Tamayo seems taken aback at how slowly she’s healing – which suggests to me that there’s more that’s human about her than there theoretically should be.  The one-on-one between Tanjirou and Yahaba is the flashiest action of the episode, with more lovely renderings of Tanjirou’s  Mizu no kokyuu.  He pays back Yahaba for Susamaru’s beheading of Yushiro, but I suspect Yahaba will no more stay dead from that than Yushiro did.  All this will presumably get sorted next week (I rather hope so, to be honest), and realistically there’s only one way I can see this skirmish ending.