‘Demon Slayer’ Dips Into Robots And Ancient Weapons In Episode 2

Another week, another episode of one of the most popular shows in the world, even if it’s often not treated as such. Demon Slayer is diving deeper into its Swordsmith Village Arc. Given that it’s only episode 2, we have not reached any of the coming big battles from the season, but we have seen some interesting developments all the same. Spoilers follow.

The most interesting aspect of the episode was the introduction of a new training robot, one clearly based on Upper Rank 1 demon Kokushibo, before he was a demon, it seems. Kokushibo has also been in a dream Tanjiro had before this, and no doubt will prove to be a key figure throughout this season. He’s wearing Sun Breathing earrings and looks like he could potentially be related to Tanjiro.

However, we learned this episode that it may be the case that Tanjiro’s dream is actually a memory from his ancestors from 300 years ago when they were visited by Kokushibo, pre-demon form.

In any case, in the present day, the Kokushibo robot serves as the most extensive training dummy ever made, with six arms used in order to replicate the two-armed moves of the brilliant swordsman. First, we see the Mist Hashira, Muichiro, a prodigy smaller than Tanjiro and close to his age, training and ignoring Tanjiro with the arrogance we see from many Hashiras.

But after he finishes training and breaks off one of the robots arms, Kotetsu, a child swordsmith whose ancestors built the robot, forces Tanjiro to start training with it, withholding food and water, in order to make Muichiro pay. After a long while and Tanjiro nearly dying from the brutality of the training, he learns a new technique similar to the Opening Thread which allows him to dodge all six arms worth of moves. He finally bests the dummy, slicing off its head, and inside appears to be a 300 year-old sword, which is where the episode ends.

This seems likely to be the hidden weapon that the Love Hashira was hinting at last episode, and also seems likely to be Tanjiro’s replacement sword for his chipped one. As of now, we don’t know the sword’s history (did it originally belong to Kokushibo, perhaps?) or what special powers it might possess. But I very much doubt that it’s just a regular old sword, given its hiding place and its age.

Demon Slayer continues to be one of the most-talked about shows airing every Sunday, and while Succession takes over Twitter every week, in reality Demon Slayer has a far larger audience. Reportedly 21% of everyone in Japan watched it every week, and it’s made a huge impact in the US as well among anime fans. We’ll see what happens with the sword next week, so stay tuned for that.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.