Hello everyone and welcome to the final post about the second season of Kimetsu no Yaiba! This is going to be a shorter one since I’m prepping the final review but there’s still plenty to talk about. So without further ado, lets dive in!
Starting off lets talk about my overall thoughts for the arc. As a whole I think Yaiba has everything it needs. All the basic beats, all the important core pieces of the narrative. An MC struggling against stronger and stronger foes, a few groupies with distinct personality traits, the mentor and a villain with a tragic backstory. Everything you need for a basic Shounen story is present in this season. So why then for the past few episodes now have I really only praised Yaiba’s production, which is indeed rather good. I’ll be answering this question more in depth in my final review but I can answer the spirit of the question now: The way Yaiba tells its story is very simple and straight forward, the most basic of Shounen tropes. And to prove my point I want to talk about the core of this weeks episode, the Demon’s backstory.
Right off the bat I want to say that this backstory was necessary! Like I said above, this is one of the important piece of Yaiba’s narrative. It informs us a lot about Gyutaro’s actions and his relationship with his sister, we need this. But the way Yaiba presents it is… well it’s very ham-fisted. We get small tidbits here and there but by and large it’s just an infodump at the end of the fight. Had this been presented in the same way as Uzui’s, sprinkled throughout the fight and shown through his actions more, I would be a lot more positive towards it. I understand that this is hard to do. The 2/3rds of the season is just combat after all. But at some point it becomes the writers fault they they wrote themselves into this corner.
What makes this so egregious an error to me though is that Yaiba avoids this problem with Uzui. Across the season we get these small tidbits about his life. We are introduced to a brash, rude man before learning he about his wives and how he is only acting out of concern for them. Yaiba shows us how despite his criticisms of Tanjiro and co he is still willing to give praise where it is due, to shout out his confidence in them in front of the enemy, keeping any issues private. We even learn about his inferiority complex and thoughts regarding the other Hashira and how that relates back to Rengoku, the pressure he is feeling on this arc. Uzui is an example of Yaiba doing everything I want right. Which makes Gyutaro the example of how to do it wrong.
My concerns with the narrative aside, there were also a few smaller things worth mentioning. From Nezuko’s healing fire asspull to avoid another Rengoku situation to hints towards future villains. My favorite thing though is that we learned that Mamoru freakin Miyano got cast for a future season. I cannot understate how hype I am for his reappearance. Miyano is one of my favorite VA’s and I’m looking forward to him having gotten another psychopath. He plays them so well.
Anyways that it for this week. A short post I know, but you’ll be getting the final review soon and that will be much larger. I don’t want to spend to much time on my overall thoughts here or else I’ll have nothing to write there! So instead let me pose a question to you: Am I looking at Yaiba wrong? We’ve had a lot of chats in the comments section. Some agreeing about Yaiba’s narrative, others saying I’m being to harsh. At times I’ve agreed with those criticisms, that I was perhaps being unnecessarily critical of Yaiba, as if to counterbalance the almost complete lack of criticism I’ve seen elsewhere. So I want to know what you think! Let me know down below and lets turn this last post into more of a conversation before the final review next week.
