Are You Tired Of Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen?

The funny thing is that One Piece will probably still be going by the time these two anime finally end.

Awards time is always a good reminder that the shonen meta is continuing to grow with each passing year, because that’s when that fact truly get shoved into our face the most. Everyone knows shonen is the most popular genre in anime. And unfortunately for those who hate it, it’s just continuing to grow more popular with no signs of slowing down. Or at least, it is when your anime is named either Demon Slayer or Jujutsu Kaisen.

I remember when Demon Slayer first came out. It was the most popular new anime of it’s season, but since most anime fans only watch like one or two shows a season and said shows happened to be One Punch Man and Attack on Titan, that didn’t mean much for actual popularity. I mean just look at the Winter 2023 season, Who remembers anything from then besides Vinland Saga and Trigun Stampede, which are known but not exactly the biggest names around?

That’s what Demon Slayer was back in the day. You saw some people cosplay it. You saw it get some attention. But it wasn’t going to stick around too long because unlike most Shonen Jump adaptations, people weren’t very familiar with the manga for reasons I’m not entirely sure of. Promised Neverland and Dr. Stone were known manga so their adaptations got popular pretty quickly. There was also Fire Force, but the popularity of that one is kind of all over the place.

Despite that, Demon Slayer was my favorite of those adaptations. I liked how it kept everything focused on action with beautiful animation and wasn’t afraid to get bloody while Tanjiro had one of the most heartwarming yet badass personalities I’ve seen in a shonen protagonist. How he was forced to grow strong. How he would kill his enemies while never losing his kind nature. The story was a classic underdog tale and I enjoyed it because it was told well, similar to the best Dragon Quest games. Honestly thought it was more popular than it actually was at the time, but apparently I was wrong.

But then near the end of the first season, the show suddenly exploded in popularity and everyone knew of it’s existence. And while I would never go as far as to say that Demon Slayer was the best anime of all-time, you know that feeling you get when something you love suddenly makes it big? That was what I felt seeing Demon Slayer become the new hit anime. I liked seeing it everywhere on social media. The manga sold so much that it basically destroyed the comic book industry. A lot of people got into anime because of Demon Slayer. The series itself was basically the underdog shonen protagonist that worked it’s way up, struggled for a bit, and then became king of the world. I think the only similar story we’ve had regarding that in anime since then is when Bocchi the Rock became popular. But of course, Bocchi is still somewhat new with an uncertain future while Demon Slayer has grown since with having the highest grossing Japanese movie of all-time and upping the spectacle with each subsequent season.

Then of course, there was Jujutsu Kaisen. That manga I had actually heard about and knew was kind of popular before it got an adaptation. I even knew it was going to look good because it was being made by the guys who did the God of Highschool anime. I knew it wasn’t going to be the next Demon Slayer because that was basically lightning in a bottle, but Jujutsu Kaisen didn’t need to be. It ended up becoming a huge hit on the same level through more natural growth. The amazing fight scenes and Gojo’s charisma took the anime fandom by storm, and I honestly can’t pinpoint what the exact moment was when JJK also became a blockbuster. Some people would probably say there is no moment because the entire show contributed. Whatever the case, it ended big.

I can’t really go into much detail about my feelings with Jujutsu Kaisen when it first came out like I did with Demon Slayer because unlike a lot of Western fans who preferred the former, it took me longer to warm up to Jujutsu Kaisen because I was having trouble adjusting to the show’s full commitment to style as substance and doing the bare minimum when it came to characterization so you’d be excited for the next fight scene. There are no training arcs and we barely learn anything about Yuji so aside from having the main antagonist inside of him, it was hard to relate to him. I also found the storytelling to be kind of random despite other people saying the story was if Demon Slayer had substance (which is still a lie by the way). The show had Yuji form a Naruto-like trio, break up that trio as soon as it got formed, had Yuji pal with Nanami for a few episodes and become friends with this dude you knew was going to die the instant he was revealed to be a victim of bullying in an Asian show, reunite the trio for the “tournament arc” only to separate them again, and then finally ended with them doing things as a trio.

Didn’t really like the first season after it ended initially. Just thought it had some cool fights and decided I’d wait for the second season to change my mind because I knew most Shonen Jump series got better after the initial season was over and Demon Slayer seemed like the exception in that it was good right at the start. I especially didn’t like that it won Anime of the Year when the first season hadn’t finished yet (I would have preferred any of those other anime except Appare-Ranman winning over Jujutsu Kaisen), and then it got nominated for a shit ton of awards the next year because Crunchyroll counted it’s second cour as a separate anime.

I did respect the show a lot though for being something that would make sure Demon Slayer wasn’t alone in it’s status as a leading figure of modern anime. I’m not really for one show monopolizing the attention like My Hero Academia did back when it was critically acclaimed, which is part of the reason why I was actually happy when the Anime Awards shifted into awarding Attack on Titan, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Demon Slayer equally.

It was only after a rewatch of the actual show that I understood it’s appeal more if you just ignored the story and focused purely on the fights. When the movie tried to do more storytelling, it ended up boring me a lot since that wasn’t what Jujutsu Kaisen was good at. Then when Season 2 fully committed to being nothing but a shallow action art fest and gave up any attempt to even pretend to have anything resembling good storytelling, it got a whole lot more enjoyable.

The random characters who barely get any background and only exist to get bodied or die. The action scenes filled with a lot of expository bullshit that I really did not need to know, but it looked like fucking art when it delivered. Nobara’s hilariously telegraphed and poorly executed death scene that led to some funny WholeWheatPete videos. Jujutsu Kaisen was proof that sometimes less storytelling and more action does improve your show, and any JJK fan who tries to tell me that the storytelling is actually deeper than I think can go fuck themselves because they’ve already ruined their credibility with their blatant spoilers this year.

I speak with no hyperbole when I say that despite never being my number one in any year and Kill la Kill still being the best when it comes to shonen action, these two shows are my favorite big shonens of all-time that aren’t Kill la Kill. I like both more than Mob Psycho 100. I like both more than Hunter x Hunter. I like One Piece more overall, but in terms of anime alone, Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen are my favorites because of how they prioritize action over substance in a mostly well-paced way (I’ve never been blind to Demon Slayer going through the usual crappy shonen pacing at points) that makes them more fun to watch than most shows with substance. Obviously, if you took away their beautiful animation and such, they would cease being good. But that’s like saying Iron Monkey would suck if the fight scenes sucked ass. Of course a Donnie Yen action flick without good action would suck dick. That’s common sense.

And of course, they’ve continued to maintain and even grow their popularity to this day. Which leads to one major problem that people are complaining about as we enter the eighth Crunchyroll Awards: these two shows are approaching their five-year anniversary soon. They have shown up in every awards show since they’ve come out due to Demon Slayer churning out a new iteration every year while Jujutsu Kaisen keeps getting on due to technicalities. And nothing that’s come out since Jujutsu Kaisen blew up has been able to achieve the same level of popularity.

Almost five years of Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen sweeping the awards. That’s more than double what My Hero Academia did when it was the hot thing. And while the huge fandoms will obviously not complain, it’s not hard to find people who are sick of these shows never going away. Particularly Demon Slayer because Jujutsu Kaisen has had less opportunities to dominate the meta and it doesn’t hurt that the manga is still ongoing and finding new ways to gain popularity while Demon Slayer has been finished for years now. I’ve seen a lot of Vinland fans admit they wouldn’t mind seeing Jujutsu Kaisen win.

It also doesn’t help that Swordsmith Village Arc was not as disliked as terminally online people thought it was. I think people were hoping that it’d be the equivalent of My Hero Academia Season 4 or even Season 5 in terms of lowering the popularity (when in reality it didn’t lower at all and ended up getting nominated for a ton of awards again including Anime of the Year) which just goes to show you should never look at Twitter or Reddit or MAL or anything only used by a few thousand people for common consensus. Youtube and anime conventions or even the Netflix algorithm when the new season dropped on there are the way to go in my opinion. And not Trash Taste, because they definitely are not the final say in what’s good, which should have been obvious when they said they liked Rent-A-Girlfriend.

But while Jujutsu Kaisen is definitely more fresh by comparison and doesn’t have the amount of hate and fatigue Demon Slayer gets, there’s no denying it has won a lot in these awards for three years now, is going to do so again this year, and is probably going to do so again next year when Cour 2 gets nominated for a ton. While people won’t single it out as much as Demon Slayer, they will include it when bringing up how fucking tired they are of only four shonen shows being eligible in every category, and Jujutsu Kaisen is always one of them. And I can see the problem worsen over time, but we’ll get there when we get there (edit: and apparently we’re approaching that territory sooner than expected).

I’ve actually seen one or two people bring up how Anime Awards didn’t used to be like this. They’ll bring up how the 2018 awards when Made in Abyss won had variety with My Hero Academia being the only shonen show amongst Rakugo, March Comes In Like a Lion, Made in Abyss, Land of the Lustrous, and Little Witch Academia. You know, the same awards show where My Hero won almost half the awards and would not get nearly as praised if it had won Anime of the Year then too. And last I checked, those other Anime of the Year nominations dominated most of the categories then too. How is that different from the last awards show when Cyberpunk won Anime of the Year and everything else got swept by Attack on Titan, Demon Slayer, and Spy x Family?

But there was only one big shonen as opposed to four or five. Yes, and now three big shonen dominate an awards show each year as opposed to one. It’s not necessarily positive progress but would you rather have Jujutsu Kaisen dominate this awards show by itself? Or would you rather have Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen dominate it together? And if you’re going to say you’d rather Jujutsu Kaisen dominate with a different anime, at least pick something almost as popular. Seen a lot of people suggest Mob Psycho 100 III or Heavenly Delusion to replace Demon Slayer and I just had to laugh because you’re basically giving Jujutsu Kaisen less competition since no one would vote for those two besides a few thousand people. I’m very confident Demon Slayer is not winning Anime of the Year this year, but I have a feeling it’d be in 2nd or third place in terms of overall votes if I had access to the voting percentages.

One thing is clear: barring incredibly jarring production meltdowns like what happened with Seven Deadly Sins or something more serious, Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen are not going away. No matter how many controversies they go through. No matter how annoying their fandoms can be. They’ll never drop in popularity and will honestly more likely than not rise in popularity as a result of their “stupid decisions”. People wishing that they’d suffer what My Hero Academia went through are not getting that wish fulfilled. I don’t think most people even know why My Hero Academia dropped so much in popularity in the first place. Hell, I don’t even really know myself despite all the complaining I do about how Bones didn’t treat the series well compared to their less popular shows.

And when both shows finish, they’re most likely going to be recognized as classics we’ll remember for years to come. Because if they weren’t going to achieve that status, they would have dropped in viewership a long time ago. Popular anime lose steam all the fucking time after their debuts to the point that it’s easy to forget that they were popular to begin with. Fairy Tail. The Promised Neverland. Dr. Stone. Tokyo Revengers. Blue Lock was just last year and I see no one talk about it when discussing best anime of the year. And of course, do I really need to bring up My Hero Academia and how it didn’t get even one nomination this year? Not that it’d win, but…yeah.

Is it fair to other anime? Well when has the anime industry ever been fair? Maybe if they weren’t producing forty fucking anime per season when only two of them are worth watching in the end, some things would stand out more. Maybe if the Japanese wasn’t getting their butt kicked in terms of interesting animation by the West, there’d be some change. When I think of animation that can rival Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen’s reign, I don’t think Mob Psycho 100 or Vinland Saga. I think Blue Eye Samurai. I think Adventure Time. I think Arcane. I think Invincible. Hazbin Hotel came out recently and that seems promising as well. China of course hasn’t been able to break too much in the mainstream yet, even with their popular stuff like Mo Dao Zu Shi and Heaven’s Official Blessing. I mean if Link Click Season 2 wasn’t doing it, nothing will for a while.

Not that there aren’t anime from the Japanese side that can’t reach their level. Chainsaw Man could do so in the future once it gets more adapted. If you want something big that’s not a shonen (although it has a lot of the same fandom in all honesty), Solo Leveling is the biggest new anime in a while and could reach that level with time. Spy x Family is big in it’s own way, but we all know it won’t reach Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen levels, nor does it have any interest in doing so. And I’m sorry Frieren fans, but the show is not as popular as you think it is. MAL, Reddit, and Twitter popularity are nothing compared to Youtube popularity. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that Eminence of Shadow didn’t get nominated for anything in this awards show either.

It’s common sense to state that it is fucking hard to be as big as Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen. People like to complain that big shonen have the advantage of getting all the best anime adaptations lately while everything else gets jackshit, but honestly that’s not true. It’s mostly those two juggernauts and a few others that aren’t nearly as popular that get the amazing anime adaptations. I honestly can’t think of a recent shonen aside from Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen that looks amazing besides the third season of Mob and Undead Unluck (and Frieren if you want to count that), especially since a lot of the more visually interesting anime get by more on directing than animation. And when it comes to the non-shonen stuff, I remember Heavenly Delusion looking good. I remember Trigun Stampede looking good. Dangers in My Heart and 100 Girlfriends looked good. Solo Leveling looks good too. And of course, Pluto looks cinematic as fuck.

There’s not much more to this TED talk that I can really say other than this: Fuck MAL. Fuck Anime Reddit. Fuck Anime Twitter. Fuck Anime News Network. Anyone who didn’t see Demon Slayer’s domination coming in this awards show (granted I didn’t think it was going to be an AOTY candidate, but I knew it was going to be everywhere else) needs to leave those places and hang out with the Anime NYC crowd…what’s that? They sold all of their 3-Day badges in just two days? Damn this convention is popular. I really should check it out someday.