Demon Slayer, Wrestling, and the Spectacle of Excess
Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba recently wrapped its second season, and the Entertainment District Arc was filled with animated extravagance the likes of which are rarely seen in contemporary 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 shounen tropes in the telling of its story, but despite this it is held up as something worthy of endless praise. What was I missing?
Then I chanced upon Roland Barthes’ 1954 essay on “The World of Wrestling,” and suddenly everything about Demon Slayer made perfect sense. This series lives almost exclusively in The Spectacle of Excess, where the narrative is worn on the faces and bodies of the combatants, exaggerated to the extreme in a battle between Good and Evil.
To say that Demon Slayer is a cultural phenomenon is somehow still an undersell, as this franchise continues to lay waste to records. 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 150 million copies sold, putting its per volume sales at around 6.5 million—the highest average of any of the best-selling manga in Japan. The list could go on, as Demon Slayer is a nearly $10 billion franchise when merchandise, manga sales, and box office numbers are pulled together. When the Los Angeles Times and Forbes start writing about a series, there is something magical going on.
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.
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 shounen anime have long featured heightened, exaggerated emotional states played out to the audience through 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. In battle, every movement, every facial expression is telling the entirety of the story between Good and Evil precisely in that moment. The overall narrative hardly factors 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 the Montreal Screwjob—there is no concern given to the notion that a result is rigged; rather, 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.”
Barthes compares wrestling to boxing, wherein he sees boxing as a story constructed before the eyes of the spectator. The logical conclusion matters not to a wrestling fan, while the boxing match always implies a science of the future. There must be a conclusion and it must track with what has been constructed before us. If we compare Demon Slayer to its closest rival, 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 construction 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, but 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. That is the only narrative that matters.
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.
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