Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba is beginning to develop an annoying habit of ending the volume in the middle of one arc, finishing it in the next volume and then ending that next volume in the middle of another arc. If the series is trying to have the maximum number of cliffhangers I understand but, as someone who is reading the series in chunks every few months instead of week-to-week, it’s rather frustrating (especially when writing reviews!).
All of this means that volume 3 opens with the conclusion to the fight at the end of volume 2 (where Tanjiro, Nezuko, and a demon doctor are beset at the doctor’s clinic), another fight starts in volume 3 (where Tanjiro discovers both a seriously haunted house and two other members of the Demon Slayer Corps who are the same age as him), and then volume 4 leaves off during a fight with a number of seriously creepy demons who look like spider-human hybrids. While none of these individual fights are overly long, I do keep hoping for a bit more downtime between them so that we can have some more moments of character development.
Then again, that might also be a problem since Tanjiro’s fellow Demon Slayer Corp members, the whiny Zenitsu and the literally boar-headed Inosuke, are both incredibly annoying and I’m alarmed at how they appear to be getting top billing in the advertisements for the upcoming anime (i.e, indicating that they will be a regular part of the main cast). Zenitsu is incredibly whiny and, while he has a few more balanced moments, goes so far as to be romantically jealous of Tanijiro carrying Nezuko around in her special case, while knowing that the two of them are siblings. And Inosuke is possibly the most stubborn, hot-headed shounen character I’ve ever come across in my 12+ years of reading shounen manga, which is saying something, and I groan each time he shows up on the page. Inosuke takes his bull-headedness to such extremes that I was wondering if he was supposed to be a parody and I’m not entirely convinced this isn’t the case!
Honestly, I’m baffled at how much I dislike these two characters since prior to this I thought that all of the important characters in Demon Slayer were pretty typical, non-flat manga characters and I’m hoping this trend of utterly unlikeable characters doesn’t continue into volume 5 and beyond. There do appear to be a least a few women in the Demon Slayer Corps, at least in the very highest levels of the organization, which is exciting since these days I just assume that most battle manga will forget to write in more than one or two female characters (Nezuko barely has a role in these two volumes so she feels a bit like the “chick” archtype) and it’s always nice to be proven wrong there!
I’m still excited to read the next few volumes, even if that means more creepy human-looking spider demons, but I really hope the pacing and the characterization smooth out soon.