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If you like colours and explosions and vaguely homo-erotic themes, you've discovered your happy place.

I'm going to call this anime "Bisco" to conserve energy, since watching this practically sapped me of my will to live. Misanthropy, like the rust, feeds on this sense of futility. Has humanity devolved far enough to find such twaddle enjoyable? I suppose that is the theme of this review, post-apocalyptic absurdism is now literary realism. The joke is on us.

Characters 2/10

Bisco himself is cool enough. He's strong and dumb, borderline invincible and emotionally unavailable. The perfect foil for a sensitive "good guy" sidekick. He's a cliché, obviously, ... but there's nothing wrong with clichés if you can rattle them around enough. Unfortunately there was very little rattling going on here.
Doctor Panda is more of a problem, levelling up from pathetic weakling to giga-chud with very little coaxing. If your anime is only 12 episodes long, best to focus on a tight-ass plot rather than character maturation. Figure out how weak doctor boy becomes essential to the plot and progress from there. He doesn't really need to change, he's already "good".
Big booby rust queen has a cool look, but that's about all. It doesn't really sell the "debilitating power of rust" when a terminally ill g-cup can still whoop anybody's ass.
The lesser characters and the main villain were pretty forgettable. I kind of liked the moonlighting prostitute jack of all trades girl, but she's sidelined fairly early on. I gave this section a 2 since there's really only 2 characters. And neither of them are particularly interesting.

Plot 1/10

Crazy lore for a 12 episode series, suspension of disbelief is required for viewing. Luckily for me (not being anal about rationalism, even in real life) I can accept a world of rust eating mushrooms and gigantic crabs. What I can't accept, however, is a story that relies on piss weak character motivations. If you are going to be absurd, at least have some conviction!
Big Bad is a capitalist, duh, but a nonsensical one. Here's a pop quiz for the young left-leaning readers amongst us: do we suppose that our ideological opponents are maliciously motivated by personal gain? Or are they perhaps misguided in their notion of the "greater good"? Even this bee's dick of nuance is already a cliché at this point. Big Bad wants to spread disease so that he can sell the cure, but simply selling the cure will already make him rich enough for one lifetime. So his motivation must be different then, he must be hoping to control what's left of this society. To what end? To keep the population down for ecological reasons? To prevent a second apocalypse? These would be the "reasons why" a misguided person might mistakenly commit evil. But Big Bad is not misguided, he's just evil. Ok, so does he want to wipe out the human race? No, he just wants to get personally rich... See the loop we are on? He is too evil to be merely motivated by gain, he ultimately has no motive. He exists to give our heroes someone to fight. But do they even have a reason to fight?
Bisco and the old man must cross a border and a city to find the rust eater mushroom. During this crossing they disguise as a new religious sect (which is never mentioned again). So they've crossed the assumedly endless border wall, with a vast dessert around them. Must we suppose the city itself is similarly impassable? Why couldn't they go around? Because they needed to pick up the deuteragonist, obviously! Ok, so Bisco plunges straight through the enemy encampment, losing old man in the process. Earning himself some emotional baggage and an effeminate side kick. Now we have 50 episodes or so of world-building adventures, building up the characters and establishing the lore... wait, none of that happens? They just save some kids and start a bromance? Ok, whatever floats your crab.
Regarding said bromance, the word ham-fisted does not do it justice. Characters decide to like one another so arbitrarily and unconvincingly. Why should doctor boy like prostitute girl? Because she fixed the train? These characters literally just learned each other's names as they say goodbye, adding that they'll never forget each other. Have you ever got to that level of affection before learning someone's name? And why is g-cup suddenly dtf with Bisco? And why does doctor boy physically attack Bisco to prevent him coming to harm?
People accuse Demon Slayer of being dumb, but at least it knows that it's dumb! This series made the mistake of attempting something so far beyond its capabilities. Or maybe it didn't, maybe it was a heartless cash grab from the start. Maybe an AI wrote this plot.

Design 7/10

The reason why I watched Bisco to begin with. It looked cool. Mushrooms are cool, crabs are cool, rusted boobas are cool. But cool is just the packaging. Inside the technicolor wonderland of Bisco resides an amorphous mass of contradictions and clichés (not to mention an FDA approved minimum percentage of human feces). If you scratch the shiny surface even just a little, the surging cry of a missing chromosome will assault your senses. This show is developmentally challenged, falling short of the mark at every turn. But somehow so consistently flawed that it seems to fail organically, as if it was God's mistake for allowing humanity to live this long. This show somehow possesses a Milton-esque level of tragic irony, turning the viewer against existence itself. In the end we take up arms with Satan, pitying his cruel banishment, and march upon the heavens with righteous indignation! Why give us rusty boobas if we aren't given motivation to squeeze? What fresh hell is this?!

Conclusion

Racism.

The anime the world needs right now, continues to deliver. (And our godly review comes to a close!)

Demon Slayer, bane of all elitists, proof positive that simplicity is king, returns once more to dazzle us with its zen-like purity. The story is simple and direct - Human life is precious, demons are evil, and we must stand beside our friends. It's trite, isn't it? The intellectuals amongst us are already throwing their hands up with a collective sigh. But where has intellectualism taken our world lately? Endless hair splitting has left our collective scalps bald and flaking with psoriasis. Enough of this. Demon Slayer ... isn't a head scratcher, but it certainly satisfies a deep and primal itch.
Here, in my first ever review, I hope to convince the overthinkers to cool their heads a little. We all know you're smart, and that your taste is 100% empirically superior to ours, but you're still missing something. George Orwell once said “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them", and I'm inclined to agree. But I believe the reverse holds true in this case. Demon Slayer is so profound that only an idiot could understand its depth. I, for one, am such an idiot.

Story

We begin in the eternal hellscape of the demon world. A labyrinth of stairs and paradoxes that would make M. C. Escher dizzy. Here we see Muzan berating his upper rank demons for their failings. We get a good sense of their hierarchy and powers, and how the 'big bad' is still mountains above anyone else. A few of the demons stand out as particularly interesting, but for the most part they are grotesque, endowed with markedly slappable faces and irritating personalities. They're demons though... It's okay to hate these people!
To be fair to the elitists, this scene is pretty tedious. But thematically it holds weight. For the first time we get a sense of Muzan's weltanschauung - he has an abject hatred for all change. Change equals degeneration in his mind. In other words, he has no patience for the ordinary processes of nature. We also notice that Muzan is busily engaged in some sort of chemistry or alchemy experiments. He's a scientist, a rational and unfeeling creature, who lives in a realm of eternal confusion and bitterness. Perhaps he is an allegory for the Cartesian Cogito; isolated from the phenomenal world, spinning his logocentric puzzles for himself in the dark realms of conceptual thought! But I digress, and I don't want to get all intellectual here. Demon Slayer is a simple story.

Next we return to the sunny world of Tanjiro and co. And it's refreshing, to say the least. The contrast between the good and evil characters is bold and obvious. Much like our own world, before unbridled scepticism became synonymous with intelligence (I've really gotta ease up on my thematic emphasis here!) Anyway! We are with our heroes again, and can continue the marvellous adventure. Tanjiro's sword was destroyed in the previous battle, and so he must acquire a replacement. A simple predicament, one that doesn't pertain to any obvious twists or mysteries. Or so we are led to believe. Immediately we are plunged into a parade of ancestral genetic memories, notions of advanced technology in older civilisations, and new types of smell (Brief aside: Tanjiro's sense of smell contrasts handsomely with the scopic pre-eminence of the demons. To them, and to the western rationalist tradition, the eyes are the seat of the soul. We equate "I see" with "I understand". Tanjiro answers instead with "I smell". Yes Tanjiro, you certainly do smell.) The viewer of these worldbuilding scenes will find themselves refreshed by the innate wholesomeness of it all. There's something deeply healthy about Tanjiro. And we, the sick men of Europe (and elsewhere) are bound to resent such an individual.
The story continues with an unusual training sequence, followed shortly by the appearance of the demons. Within a few episodes you'll know the combatants, and what the stakes are. It builds quickly and leaves you little time to breathe (pun intended). You're in the shit now, better be ready. But here's where I'll leave off with the synopsis. I've just finished episode 6, perhaps I'll expand on this section when the series is complete.

Visuals

Demon Slayer is the kind of girl you want to be seen with. Even if she's not satisfying you in the bedroom, she's definitely wowing your colleagues. But here's some real water-cooler talk - does anyone really care? I mean really, really care about the visuals? Of course they do! This is 2023! And we are possessed by the scopic drive, just like the demons! We are the society of the spectacle. And Demon Slayer is certainly spectacular to behold. Or is it? It's beautifully animated, yes. But it's also riddled with zany 'manga faces', jejune 'two-tone' colour schemes for each character, and painfully obvious visual foreshadowing. You can't really spoil Demon Slayer, it spoils itself!
I'm going to be the ultimate contrarian here. Most people (even the elitists) agree that Demon Slayer's visuals are top-tier. It should be the sole thing we can all agree on. But no! We are agreeing on the wrong thing! Instead we should set the visuals aside for now. They are good, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that we have “noticed.”

Sound

Another overvalued sense. Are you getting what I’m hinting at yet? Here’s the real criteria, here’s the category that places Demon Slayer in the highest echelon of entertainment.

Smell

That’s right, Demon Slayer Smells. This series is reason enough for Aniplex to invest in the Smell-O-Vision! Can you imagine the reckless highs and nauseous thrills? To experience the sensual potpourri of decapitated demons turning to ash in the sunlight. The body trembles at the mere thought!
But there was something less frivolous to say here. It is the sense of smell that reveals Demon Slayer’s quality. In order to completely grasp it, we must be willing to put the more critical senses aside. Smell alone radiates a profound aura of acceptance. It does not seek to undermine or explain away. Nor does it put on airs and strut about. Smell has an innocent, childish curiosity about it. Tell smell that you’ve just farted, and he won’t hesitate to imbibe upon your odorous fumes. He can’t help himself; he simply must smell!

This calls to mind the differences of design found in French and German toilets. The French toilet, the more elegant of the two, angles the bowl in such a way that it hides a good portion of one’s deposits. The German toilet, in contrast, proudly displays the user’s contributions. The reason for this is simple – Germans like to look at (and smell) their own shit.
Why, you might ask, is this desirable? Short answer, Germans are weird. But in other ways (in some very important ways) Germans are healthy. Yes, the smell of shit has long been an indicator of health or disease. Perhaps the undaunted curiosity of smell is an evolutionary trait, long since habituated in our ancestral memories. We know it’s right to sniff everything. On some deep and primal level, we must learn to sniff again!

This is what Demon Slayer teaches us – to smell the world around us. Smell is the most personal of the senses, and the most honest. It is also the sense most deeply connected to memory. It carries us back to our formative years, to bask in the rosy glow of bygone hours. Our childhood returns to us, our foolish hopes, our naïve ideals. Things we think we’ve grown too old for. Smell preserves them from our harsh and critical minds.
Smell is also immune to comparison. You cannot smell things in a certain way, nor be educated to “smell better.” But our eyes and ears can be trained. The study of aesthetics has made us wise in matters of art and music. There are professors in these sciences, critics, connoisseurs, and dilettantes of every stripe. All of them can tell you the best way to examine a work of art. And all of their opinions are much better than yours or mine. But they cannot tell us how to smell. No. Smell alone remains the domain of the idiot. And here we proudly stand with nose in hand! I smell, therefore I am.

Demon Slayer smells. Don’t flush it until you’ve had a good hard whiff!

(And it ends beautifully!)