In case you missed it, I took a stab at deconstructing the fascinating and (to me at least) inexplicable phenomenon that is Kimetsu no Yaiba’s success.  I’ve been meaning to do it for a long time but frankly, I don’t really have any answers.  I think it’s fairly easy to explain why this series is a hit, but not why it’s the hit – the biggest 2-3 year commercial blockbuster in the history of manga and anime.  Not everything in life has an explanation – that is to say, one we can quantify.  That’s a wholly unsatisfying landing point for me, but it’s the only one I can honestly arrive at.

This episode, which concludes the “season” that is Mugen Ressha-Hen (which is really just the Demon Slayer movie repackaged for TV), is par for the course.  It was perfectly fine – quite good in fact, with some really lovely visual flourishes.  But given that it was clearly supposed to be some sort of massive emotional crescendo, I found the impact a bit underwhelming.  We barely got to know Rengoku and, frankly, while he’s a perfectly heroic guy he’s not all that interesting.  It probably works better as a two-hour, one-sitting experience – but that payoff seems a bit much when the buildup was stretched over seven (actually eight) weeks.

Rengoku was a guy who very much did as expected in life – and death – and that makes him a perfect poster boy for Kimetsu no Yaiba.  I pretty much figured he was going to die here because that was the shounen thing to happen, and indeed he did.  He certainly died well (and well-animated).  Rengoku did his best to take Akaza with him in a fight he pretty much knew would be his last, but in the end he came up short.  He did fulfill his primary objective of (somewhat improbably) saving everyone on the train, but Akaza managed to sever his own arm and escape from Rengoku’s torso in time to flee the rising sun.

As is often the case with Kimetsu, the demon POV was more interesting than the human.  Akaza seemed genuinely torn up by Rengoku’s fate, even if he did gather himself when his own hide came under serious threat.  I can see where, from his perspective, someone as strong as Rengoku wanting to stay human makes absolutely no sense.  But even that’s a pretty common theme in demon-undead focused battle shounen.  In truth, this finale was pretty much what Kimetsu generally does – dot all the “i”s and cross all the “t”s in moderately stylish fashion.  It’s the struggle to find anything truly surprising or exceptional that makes the mystery of its staggering popularity so vexing, though perhaps the lack of surprises is a part of the reason in itself.

The worst part of all this was all the crying at the end.  Truthfully, this was over the top and went on way, way too long.  If Inosuke is the voice of reason you know things are off-kilter, but he certainly spoke for me when he scolded Tanjirou and Zenitsu (who was artfully sidelined for the entire fight, thank goodness) to stop their damn whining already.  A little restraint would have gone a long way there (I actually had to fast forward a couple of times), but it is what it is.  At least the fight itself was beautifully choreographed, as usual.

I’ll be flying blind going into the Yuukoku-hen arc, but that’s nothing new as I went into Mugen Train cold as well.  Given that no one in this series we’ve met before or since has been remotely as interest as Muzan, I’d love to see him return to the narrative.  But as the final boss (presumably) I don’t suppose that’s going to happen for quite a while.  A big factor in whether I’ll be able to stick with Kimetsu is going to come down to just how much of a role Zenitsu (and to a lesser extent Inosuke) play – one of the reasons I got through Mugen Ressha-hen was their minimal involvement.