Haruki was far from alone in his thoughts.
In fact, even Rei himself, when the Demon Slayer ani had first co out in his previous life, had watched the early episodes with one hand on the remote and a running internal comntary of complaints.
Because the truth was, the plot of the first few episodes was genuinely cliché.
An entire family slaughtered by demons. A surviving boy embarking on the path of demon slaying for the sake of his sister. Grueling training, brutal trials, and eventually joining the ranks of the Demon Slayer Corps. There were no surprises. The story moved in exactly the direction any experienced viewer would expect it to, at exactly the pace they would expect it to move.
And yet.
Just because you could guess the plot did not an the work was boring. That was a logical error that a surprising number of people made. Ultraman had been running for decades. The mont a monster appeared on screen, every child in the audience already knew exactly what was going to happen next. That had never once stopped Ultraman from being beloved across generations and still producing new entries to this day.
Demon Slayer had never relied on unpredictable plotting to earn its place. What it relied on was sothing far more difficult to execute and far more difficult to dismiss once it landed. It dissected the delicate and deeply human emotions of both its protagonists and its antagonists with extraordinary precision, and then it delivered those emotions directly into the chest of the audience like cannonballs fired at point-blank range.
The problem was that this particular quality required ti and accumulated story to fully realize. A single episode was not enough runway. The full depth of the bond between Tanjiro and Nezuko, the thing that would eventually make audiences weep without any sha, could not be established and then detonated in forty-five minutes. Everyone watching tonight had been slightly moved. But slightly moved, in the cold light of post-episode analysis, was easy to dismiss.
And so they did.
The forums and comnt sections filled up rapidly as the night wore on.
"I can only call it decent, honestly. There were a few minutes that were touching, but stepping back and looking at the whole picture, the story is quite weak."
"It's the story of a mountain boy encountering vampires and becoming a vampire hunter to save his infected sister. You could find half a dozen novels with this exact premise published forty or fifty years ago. Nothing here is new."
"This is the ani IP that Shirogane invested five hundred million yen into developing? I genuinely laughed out loud. If the production quality wasn't as good as it is, I would have fallen asleep."
"Here we go again. It was exactly the sa when the Hunter x Hunter manga first started serializing. The sa kinds of comnts appeared endlessly and then, within three months, every single one of those people quietly disappeared.
Now Shirogane-sensei launches a new work and it starts all over again. Don't pay attention to any of this. When exactly did it beco acceptable to judge whether an ani is worth watching after a single episode? The first episode of Demon Slayer is internally consistent and the production quality is genuinely exceptional.
If this exact episode had been made by a first-ti screenwriter with no na attached to it, there would be a crowd of ani fans praising it right now. But because the author happens to be Shirogane-sensei, the people who were already waiting with their knives out have finally found their excuse to appear."
"It cannot be helped. Shirogane-sensei is the single most dominant figure in the Japanese ani industry right now, and arguably globally as well. He is cutting into the revenue streams of a lot of people. Set aside the Hoshimori Group for a mont. Which of the other five of Japan's Six Major Comic Groups does not have a reason to resent him?
The original Four Major Animation Production Companies in Japan are currently being suppressed by Illumination Animation. Do they not resent him? In the ani rchandise market, Shirogane-sensei's works have been the hottest property for two consecutive years. Do the distributors who failed to secure partnerships with him not resent him? A lot of the people posting negative comnts tonight did not arrive here organically."
"Honestly this is getting ridiculous. So now anyone who dislikes Shirogane-sensei's work is automatically a paid troll? The fans have turned into an opinion dictatorship."
"People who genuinely dislike a work simply stop watching it and move on. They do not feel the need to write paragraphs of criticism in a comnt section an hour after the first episode airs. The ones who show up imdiately with coordinated negativity are not disappointed viewers. They are sothing else entirely.
And the standard they are applying, judging an entire ani series on the basis of its first episode, would result in ninety-nine percent of all ani in Japan being condemned before they ever had a chance to find their footing."
"My honest take is that Demon Slayer is genuinely good. The first episode has not reached the heights of Hunter x Hunter, and I think most reasonable people would agree with that. But it is comfortably above the passing line.
To the people rushing to bury it tonight, wait. Give it ti. If the quality stays flat, co back then and say your piece. But doing it now just makes you look like you arrived with your conclusion already written."
"The sister protecting the brother at the end of the episode got to more than I expected. I did not anticipate caring that much this quickly."
"The production values genuinely are on a completely different level. I keep going back to the snow sequence in the opening. It does not look like anything else currently airing."
"I am more optimistic than most people in this thread. Shirogane-sensei does not make works that peak in the first episode. If anything, the fact that this is 'only' above the passing line right now tells there is a lot more coming."
From night through to the following morning, it could be said without exaggeration that this was the most widespread and coordinated wave of negative discussion that any of Shirogane's works had ever faced across the entire network since he had first risen to prominence.
Rei had anticipated it.
The early plot of Demon Slayer was not bad. It was not weak. But it was not the kind of opening that silenced criticism on contact the way certain works could. It was above the passing line and nothing more, at least at this stage. The depth that would eventually make the series legendary had not yet had the space to erge.
What surprised him was the scale. In the past, whenever a handful of haters or internet trolls had materialized to attack his works, Shirogane's genuine fanbase had crushed them swiftly and completely. Accounts deleted, argunts abandoned, the opposition scattered within hours. But now the opposition was not scattering. It was holding its ground and pushing back with unusual coordination and volu.
"There really are a lot of people in the Japanese ani industry who want to see fail," Rei thought, with a small and unbothered smile.
The number of coordinated trolls online was too large to be the work of a single company operating independently. There were multiple parties behind this, almost certainly. Capital interests across several competing organizations, all of them watching the sa opportunity and all arriving at the sa mont to take it.
The thinking was not difficult to understand. Rei had been elevated to sothing close to a god in the Japanese ani world. And a god only needed one visible failure to be pulled from the altar. If a work of his genuinely struggled, if the ratings underperford and the public narrative could be shaped quickly enough in those early weeks, then every competitor and every company he had ever displaced would unite behind that narrative and amplify it until it beca the accepted truth.
The ani market was a capital market at its foundation. And a significant portion of the audience, through no particular fault of their own, tended to accept the consensus that public opinion handed them.
They watched what they were told was worth watching. And when they found a praised work boring, their first instinct was to question their own taste rather than question whether the praise had been manufactured.
For an ordinary work with an ordinary fanbase, coordinated negativity at this scale could be genuinely damaging. It could define a series before it had the chance to define itself.
But Rei smiled at his phone screen and set it down.
"It just so happens that the work you are all trying to bury is Demon Slayer."
In his previous life, Demon Slayer had been a manga that stood at the very edge of cancellation. It had teetered there, looked into the void, and then turned around and climbed back up to beco one of the most beloved works in the history of the dium.
Whatever darkness these coordinated attacks could generate around the ani adaptation in its opening week, it could not possibly be darker than what the original manga had survived during its serialization. Not even close.
Negative traffic was still traffic. People who showed up to argue about a work were still people who were watching it, talking about it, keeping it alive in the discourse. Rei had no interest in managing any of this personally. A work's quality did not need to be defended by its creator's voice. It only needed ti and enough episodes to speak for itself.
He put his phone away and waited.
Around noon the following day, the ratings data for the first episode of Demon Slayer was released.
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