This week’s episode of Demon Slayer brought us to the final stage of the Hashira training, under the Stone Hashira Himejima. Last week’s episode, amongst the many training episodes, was quite a refreshing one. Unlike the episodes just prior to it, season 4 episode 5 not only covered a good chunk of canon material but also covered material that felt meaningfully different from the other training sequences. Where this season has perhaps suffered the most is in its repetitiveness; while all of the Hashira trainings have been different, the overarching message and narrative behind each episode has been more or less the same. Tanjiro and other main characters train hard and advance while nameless characters struggle to keep up and eventually resolve to act as strong support for those who are actually capable of fighting the strongest of demons out there.
While this episode didn’t fully fall into that category of things, as there were some movements in the story outside of the training, it still dragged a bit in places where the chapter-long training sequence needed to be stretched out and elongated to fill the episode. But, overall, this was a decent one by this season’s standards. (Spoilers ahead for Demon Slayer Season 4 Episode 6: The Strongest of the Demon Slayer Corps).
More Demon Slayer Training
This particular training was entertaining and interesting to watch, both because of how comically difficult some aspects of it were (seeing Corps members cling to rocks for warmth was pretty funny) and because it’s the only time we’ve seen Tanjiro focus this much on manifesting and maintaining his mark. This training took him the longest by far, but it’s the end of it that really sees him move his attention to the mark. I’m glad he found some method to trigger its progression to the brighter, more defined form but also glad he didn’t immediately learn the trick to manifesting and maintaining it from something as simple as a quick conversation with Genya about repetitive motion. Considering how massive an amplifier in strength the marks are (think back to how it let him briefly contend with an upper rank during the previous arcs) and considering how powerful the emotions Tanjiro was feeling were during the manifestation, it would be cheap if learning it were that easy. The rock-moving scenes in particular were quite well animated (almost as well animated as Zenitsu dashing for a warm rock) and I haven’t seen the series make use of vascularity to indicate effort quite as much as this episode. All nice touches.
The wholesome portion of this episode came from Tanjiro’s cooking, something which got quite a bit more attention here than in the manga. In contrast to some of the other elongated / anime-extra portions of the episode, I actually appreciated this one. For one, it was a warm moment where we got to see Tanjiro be a bit more even with the rest of the Corps members and not just seem superior to them physically. But also, considering that the secret to repetitive motion for him was recalling the memories of his loved ones, cooking for others like he once did for his family served as a nice pretense to his method.
To cover the middle of the episode last, we got some movement on the Muzan side. As always, the art and animation in his realm is utterly fantastic and captivating and I look forward to seeing it every time. But, it’s put a clear timer on how long it’ll be before we start seeing bigger movement in the story. Muzan has located nearly every Demon Slayer and is inching closer to finding the Ubuyashiki mansion and Nezuko. Considering that the final two episodes will have extended lengths (episode 7 will be 40 minutes and episode 8 60), it’s a safe bet that we’re about to get some movie-style action from the series. And while the slice-of-life elements to some of the training episodes have been nice, Demon Slayer shines brightest during that kind of action. Hopefully the anime will also treat us to some nice expository scenes for Himejima.
©Koyoharu Gotoge / SHUEISHA / Aniplex / ufotable
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