Demon Slayer Season 3 Episode 10
Tanjiro and his Demon Slayer cohorts don’t lack for strength or numbers this season. These warriors exceeded their limits in more ways than one, but one quality they lacked when they attacked was the implicit power of love. Enter Mitsuri Kanroji, the Demon Slayer’s Love Hashira, who brings a very unique touch to the fight. Kanroji’s feminine touch helps propel forward “Love Hashira Mitsuri Kanroji,” the season’s productive but chaotic and bloated penultimate episode.
Hantengu has proven to be a formidable foe throughout the season, but in “Love Hashira Mitsuri Kanroji”, he delivers a great injustice far more devastating than any demonic wound: he calls Kanroji a swine. If Kanroji wasn’t already properly motivated to destroy this monster, she will surely gain the proper killer instinct during the fight with Hantengu’s final form, Zohakuten. Epic blows are exchanged between Kanroji’s Love Breathing techniques and Zohakuten’s concentrated electrified dragon blasts that explode into stunning displays of power.
Those explosions looked great during the previous episode’s finale, and “Love Hashira Mitsuri Kanroji” delivers them with even more electrified precision as Kanroji steps into the spotlight. Genya and Nezuko also make a brief appearance just to remind you that they still exist and deserve credit for this victory. It’s likely that next week’s finale will give each character a substantial role to play in taking down this top-ranked demon, but at this point, they’re powerless to rise above Kanroji’s main creep power.
It’s been a minute since Kanroji was front and center, but Demon Slayer wastes no time in reminding viewers that he’s a constant source of fan service. There are some pretty gratuitous scenes where Cleavage Love Hashira is more of an eye candy than a legitimate fighter. There’s also some really condescending dialogue about how a Kanroji woman can be as strong as she is, which feels like an outdated argument for being three seasons old. gutting Zohakuten’s dragon tendrils. It certainly doesn’t seem like a coincidence that she’s one of the few demon slayers in the series to be responsible for destroying this phallic tentacle attack. It’s Kanroji who does the heavy lifting here, while Tanjiro shouts questioningly about what to do.
This entire season of Demon Slayer has been one giant battle. “Love Hashira Mitsuri Kanroji” separates itself from the previous installments with a particularly grandiose quality that makes this fight feel more like the type of spectacle seen in Dragon Ball Z or One Piece. Kanroji’s unique whip sword brings a real acrobatic quality to the fight, where it feels more in the air than on the ground. This season has struggled a bit to make each episode’s fight unique, and “Love Hashira Mitsuri Kanroji” has made its mark, and it’s not even a moment too soon, the finale is just around the corner. The clash between Kanroji and Zohakuten never fails to look incredible, even if it gets a little repetitive as Kanroji slices through dragon heads like butter while Zohakuten regenerates them endlessly.
There’s a lot to like about this episode, but it’s hard not to roll your eyes once Kanroji’s fight descends into a pretty pointless flashback. The structure of Demon Slayer has become so predictably formulaic this season that I wouldn’t be surprised at this point if Tanjiro accidentally stepped on an ant and then had a five-minute flashback to that ant’s difficult past. Demon Slayer clearly filled out this story, but less can be more, as in this case with Kanroji (although she totally goes with black hair). And hey, Obanai Iguro and his snake are damn cool! It’s a shame they aren’t involved in this battle!
“Love Hashira Mitsuri Kanroji” isn’t necessarily a bad episode of Demon Slayer, but it’s everything you’d expect from an episode focused on Kanroji vs. Zohakuten, for better or for worse. “Love Hashira Mitsuri Kanroji” features some of the most beautiful animation of the season. However, this has become the baseline of Demon Slayer where viewers expect to be visually dazzled and the episodes have yet to do more. The third season finale of Demon Slayer is inexorably approaching, and it’s not a moment too soon, which will hopefully bring everything together on a satisfying note rather than continuing to drag out progress. Demon Slayer’s production staff will be more hated than Muzan Kibutsuji himself if they somehow end this season with Upper Rank Demon Hantengu still on the loose.
