Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba might be one of the most popular action series running today, but in all the hype in can be quite easy to forget that it’s indeed an action series being published in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump. This means no matter how innovative it might seem, there will always be tropes and specific formulas that will be familiar to those who have experienced multiple series from the magazine. For all of its sense of finality with the latest arc of the series as Tanjiro and the remaining Hashira headed toward Muzan’s base…it might be backpedaling a bit.
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Because when the fight against Muzan Kibutsuji seemed like it was finally over in Chapter 200 of the series, and fans said goodbye to several key characters, the rug was pulled out from under us as Muzan continued to evolve. In fact, it’s been a problem with this fight in general that’s giving majorly unwelcome flashbacks to the worst aspects of the fights in Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball Z.
The first of which is setting a time frame for the battle. One of the major caveats in the battle with Muzan was that they would need to survive until dawn as a way to deal a finishing blow to the demon who would survive other attacks. The hour Tanjiro and the others needed to keep fighting is definitely more reasonable than Freeza’s now infamous “five minutes” against Goku on Planet Namek in Dragon Ball, but noting a time frame also limits the rhythm of the fight.
Chapters progressed with characters noting how ten minutes pass, then in the next it was suddenly already dawn. Putting a time stamp on the fight at all doesn’t add tension, but instead just makes one question how time flows during the fight. This would be fine on its own, if the rest of the fight didn’t look like Dragon Ball Z too.
As Tanjiro continued to struggle, Muzan continued to reveal new abilities and new forms. In a major “this is not even my final form” kind of move, Muzan showed how well he was going to adapt to each move. This lead to some other strange choices to weaken Muzan not with Tanjiro’s fighting skill, but a poison with not one, two, three, but four delayed effects that hit his body over time.
It wasn’t just the Freeza fight either as the end of the fight with Muzan gave pretty harsh parallels to the fight with Cell. After the sunrise melts Muzan away, he revealed he had some surviving cells and is now surviving within Tanjiro. Isolated, these events aren’t that egregious but putting them all together forms a strange pattern within this fight.
The sense of finality has gone out the door (especially as the series backtracks on one of its more exciting decisions), and the fight had ballooned to a point where it left the more grounded and dangerous natures of previous fights behind. This has been a trend going for a while now as several characters died off seemingly at high speeds, when previous arcs made sure to take care of each death and treat it as a monumental moment. The way it treated its villains upon death with somber, well-paced reflection is why fans love the series too!
Because when you remove the severity of death from the series, it’s not a relief. That morbid cloud hanging over each fight is what makes them enthralling. Tanjiro is a vulnerable person, and that vulnerability goes out of the window with the bombastic nature of the Muzan fight. If this truly is the final fight of the series, hopefully things can truly end here before the more fights go even further off the rails much like Dragon Ball once did.
