The Spectacle of Excess: Kimetsu no Yaiba-hen

Michael Lee

gyutaro demon slayer kimetsu no yaiba episode 10 — Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba | ufotable

A version of this essay was picked up by Paste Magazine. To find the full version, please follow the link here. Below please find an excerpt of the original piece.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba is reaching the end of its current season, and the Entertainment District Arc has been filled with animated extravagance the likes of which is rarely seen in anime. I have often struggled with understanding the appeal of Demon Slayer despite being impressed by its visuals. It is narratively unremarkable, deploying clean and clear shōnen tropes in the telling of its story, but despite this it held up as something worthy of endless praise. What was I missing? Then I chanced upon Roland Barthes 1954 essay, The World of Wrestling, and suddenly everything about Demon Slayer made perfect sense. This series lives almost exclusively in Barthes’ notion of the Spectacle of Excess, where the narrative is worn on the faces and bodies of the combatants, moment to moment, exaggerated to the extreme in a battle between Good and Evil.

demon slayer characters tanjiro nezuko zenitsu inosuke — Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba | ufotable

How Big Is It?

To say that Demon Slayer is a cultural phenomenon is somehow still an undersell, as this franchise continues to lay waste to its competition and break records while doing so. In 2020 (and into 2021), the movie Demon Slayer: Mugen Train became the highest grossing animated film of all time in Japan, dethroning Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 classic, Spirited Away, by raking in a colossal $503 million worldwide. There are 23 volumes of the manga, with over 150 million total copies sold, putting its per volume sales at around 6.5 million, the highest average of any of the best-selling manga in Japan (for comparison, One Piece sells on average 4.8 million per volume). There are fanfics written about it, there are blog posts a plenty, there is a pop-up Demon Slayer-themed restaurant at Universal Studios Japan. The list could go on, as Demon Slayer is a franchise with revenue north of $10 billion when merchandise, manga sales, and box office numbers are pulled together. That figure puts it well above other popular shōnen franchises like Naruto or My Hero Academia. And when the Los Angeles Times and Forbes start writing about a series, something unique is going on here.

So how does an essay about wrestling from the 1950s help make sense of a shounen battle anime in the 2020s? Let’s get into it.

tanjiro gyutaro desperate slice demon slayer — Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba | ufotable

A Light Without Shadow

Barthes begins: “The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theaters... wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bull-fights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.”

While shōnen anime have long featured heightened, exaggerated emotional states played out to the audience with long-winded screams and displays of physicality not of this world, none have done so with the same degree of spectacle that Demon Slayer has. The idea of emotion without reserve is fundamental to Demon Slayer, every emotional beat is exaggerated for maximum impact. In battle, every movement, every facial expression is telling the entirety of the story between Good and Evil precisely in that moment. It has to be that intense to keep the viewer on the edge of their seat. The overall narrative of Demon Slayer hardly registers in the grand scheme of things. It holds the weight of a wrestler cutting a promo to set up a fight—which can certainly be entertaining when it’s the Macho Man—but what really matters is answering the question of “will Justice be served in the ring?” Will the Good Tanjiro strike with his Hinokami Kagura and defeat the Evil Gyutaro. Further to that point, because Demon Slayer is so simplistic in its presentation, it is a foregone conclusion that somehow Tanjiro will prevail, but fans accept this. Much like a wrestling fan is aware that a fight is scripted—save for something like the Montreal Screwjob—there is no concern given to the notion that a result is rigged, fans of Demon Slayer abandon themselves “to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what [they] think but what [they] see.”

(l) Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba | ufotable (r) Attack on Titan | Studio MAPPA

A Tale of Two Sports

In order to provide a point of comparison for his rationale, Barthes makes a distinction between wrestling and boxing, with boxing being a story constructed before the eyes of the spectator. A boxing match is a story that is woven across the entirety of the event, it needs to be coherently—and logically—understood at its conclusion by the spectator who has been following along round-by-round like a novel, read chapter-by-chapter. Wrestling, by comparison, “demands an immediate reading of juxtaposed meanings, so there is no need to connect them… the logical conclusion matters not to a wrestling fan.” Spectating a wrestling match, we are not asked to apply logic from the beginning of the fight to the end, If the bad guy is working over the good guy in the beginning, appearing to be vastly superior, this mismatch doesn’t have to track at the end when the good guy wins. We only need to read the emotion of the current moment to be entertained. We feel the pain of the good guy losing early on, but have forgotten that by the finale and experience jubilation when he vanquishes his foe. In boxing, there must be a conclusion that tracks with what has been constructed before it.

If we compare Demon Slayer to its closest rival in terms of crowd size and fanbase fervor, the bombastic boxing match that is Attack on Titan, we see the wrestling and boxing metaphor laid bare. While Demon Slayer can almost exclusively live in the moment-to-moment of battle, Attack on Titan does rely on “the passage of time” and “the rise and fall of fortunes” that Barthes ascribes to boxing. In Attack on Titan, the combatants present differing philosophies that do not immediately and insistently declare their Good or Evil intention. There are ups and downs. One side might have an advantage on the Tale of the Tape, but how it plays out in the ring could be different. To further the boxing analogy, Attack on Titan’s story ‘constructed before the eyes of the spectator’ is certain to go the full 12 rounds. Neither side will land the KO punch. The shifting fog of morality that shrouds the world of Attack on Titan means that even at this late stage of the series (it is in its final season) we are unsure who Good and Evil are. When the final bell rings, the scores will have to be tallied by the judges to determine the winner. There can be disagreement about whether Eren is justified in his ambition, and the series could end in a split decision.

Demon Slayer offers none of that. Good must beat Evil. Tanjiro will somehow succeed, and we know this, yet we want to get lost in the spectacle of him achieving this feat. The spectacle is the only narrative that matters.

gyutaro demon slayer kimetsu no yaiba — Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba | ufotable

Body Narrative

This is possible because the Evil that Tanjiro faces is telegraphed to us as being Evil of the highest order through the voices, faces, and bodies of the villains our hero faces. Barthes describes a wrestler known as “Thauvin, a fifty-year-old with an obese sagging body who displays in his flesh the characters of baseness, the bastard appears as organically repugnant.” From first sight, the audience recognizes this character as Evil, the “viscosity of his personage” one of pure malevolence.

In Demon Slayer, there is no need for the audience to be told that the antagonist of this arc, Upper Rank Six demon Gyutaro, is Evil, he embodies it. His corporeality is that of dying, decaying flesh, his face hideous, his eyes menacing. Before he says a word—from the second he enters the ring—it is clear that we the audience will root against this character. We need not judge him with our minds, for our physiology has already awoken a response. According to Barthes, our own bodies are repulsed by the figure before us. It is human nature. The taunts and condescension that ooze from Gyutaro, courtesy of voice actor Osaka Ryouta, helps give the character an even more affecting aura of Evil. His stellar performance makes Gyutaro a great villain. Every word he utters is filled with contempt for our heroes, and we love it.

Presented in this way, a backstory is almost unnecessary. Gyutaro’s heinous past is assumed, he is a demon after all, and we the audience know that what we will see is all of the trickery, cruelty, and sadism we expect of characters like him. As he is a formidable foe, he will deliver this to us in an excessive—at times beautiful—display that will be tough for Tanjiro to overcome. We expect to be entertained by this spectacle. We see in the body of Gyutaro the “seed of the fight”—from our first look at him, how the fight might play out can be read on Gyutaro’s physical body— but as the fight goes on, the seed can blossom in ways that might seem unexpected, yet ultimately fall into the familiar. A wrestler reaching for a steel chair and whacking the good guy when the ref conveniently isn’t looking being a great example of this. It’s a dastardly tactic the audience might not see coming, but is certainly part of the ‘seed’ the evil character has sown. Though this ‘seed’ concept might make it seem like a fight is merely going through the motions, it’s all about hitting the beats with the right amount of excess and gusto. Over the course of a fight, there are three tenets that are essential for any good spectacle, Suffering, Defeat, and Justice.

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gyutaro tanjiro showdown demon slayer — Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba | ufotable

Michael Lee is the Editor of KOSATEN, and is currently pursuing research on Japanese fandom, with a particular focus on doujinshi and other fan-created media. Reach out to me on Twitter!