[Anime Review] Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: Fear Creeps In

I am writing my honest impressions.
Please take this as just one individual's opinion and feel free to brush it off.

Demon Slayer begins with the brutal murder of the protagonist's family, including young children.

Perhaps this is a necessary prelude to establish the structure where the protagonist is thrust from a picture-perfect, happy daily life into the depths of despair, and from there, embarks on a path of carnage.

However, I found this a bit difficult to handle.

I have two children.
They are still young.

My firstborn son was born with a heart condition and underwent three surgeries by the time he was six months old, two of which were open-heart surgeries.

The sight of my son returning to the ICU after surgery, hooked up to a ventilator, and sleeping with an almost comical amount of IVs and tubes attached to his body.

And the deep, jagged scar on his chest.

My life motto is "Never forget your sense of humor, no matter what", so even when my son was in that state, I didn't get too serious and we spent our hospital stay in a lighthearted way.

However, the scene of the family massacre in this story awakened the fear I had buried deep in my heart that "my son might die."

Fear creeps in.

I have watched incredibly gory movies and anime, and I love reading Stephen King, so I generally have a high tolerance for massacre scenes and the like.

I've seen plenty of other works where children are killed.
I should be relatively fine even with things that are quite gruesome.

Yet, for some reason, I felt something I just couldn't accept in the opening of Demon Slayer.

I wonder why.
It's a mystery even to me.

Perhaps it's because I felt the tragic deaths of the children were too much like a stage prop.

I felt as though their deaths were placed there like items set in a miniature garden, just to express the protagonist's "feelings"... that's how I perceived it.

I apologize if this interpretation hurts those who love this work.

However, as a mother myself, that is how I ended up perceiving the beginning of this story.
*Thankfully, my son is doing well.

Well, for that reason, I continued on with the story without being able to fully immerse myself in it.

Since this story is praised all over the world, I thought it would be a waste to just walk away here.

And, I'm glad I kept watching.

I was saved by the straightforwardness, strength, and Buddha-like kindness of the protagonist, Tanjiro.

Which is to say, the author of this story, Koyoharu Gotouge, is a genius.

Now, having set aside the heavier topics, I would like to talk about this anime from an otaku perspective as well.

I absolutely love sword fighting action.

Demon Slayer had very beautiful animation right from the opening, so my expectations were high.
And it exceeded those expectations.

I also understood why children everywhere are all shouting things like "Water Breathing!"

You just want to do it yourself, lol.

Although this evaluation is based only on my limited range of knowledge, I wonder if the action scenes in Demon Slayer are among the most beautiful in Japanese sword-fighting works.

I wrote that in a complicated way, but basically, it's just super cool.

Even I, who was a bit put off at the beginning of the story, ended up rewatching it over and over again.

I hadn't watched much anime since the early 90s, so I felt the passage of time, realizing how much animation has evolved over these 30 years.

And, above all, there are the demons.

As the title suggests, Demon Slayer is a story about demon hunting, but the demons have their own circumstances too.
That aspect is depicted quite carefully, and before I knew it, I found myself sympathizing with the demons.

The concept of good triumphing over evil has already collapsed in the modern world, hasn't it...

Thinking about things like that, I watched Demon Slayer.

And actually, I haven't read the original work, and I've only seen the first season of the anime, so I'm thinking I need to watch the movie soon and catch up to the second season.

When all is said and done, I think I will see it through to the end.

*The following is my personal evaluation of the first season of the anime.

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I have summarized my evaluation criteria and my personal preferences here.