Well, the popularity of “Demon Slayer” never stops, does it?
Even the big guys in my office are talking about “Demon Slayer” all the time while they are at work, and they are looking at their smartphones and wondering which figure they should buy.
The popularity of “Demon Slayer” has involved even these uncles, but why has it become so popular throughout Japan?
Personally, I think it’s because of Weekly Jump, where the original manga of “Demon Slayer” was serialized.
When I saw the anime of “Demon Slayer”, my first thought was that it was indeed interesting, but that it was a typical Weekly Jump work.
Now that I’m an adult, I’m no longer in the habit of buying and reading Jump, but as someone who read a lot of it until I was in my mid-twenties, I thought that this was a further evolution of the fun of Jump manga.
So what kind of manga is “Weekly Jump” manga? Generally speaking, the philosophy that describes Weekly Jump is “effort, friendship, and victory”.
Well, it’s not something that Jump says officially, but it’s a phrase that emerged spontaneously during the rise of the 80s and 90s.
It’s true that many of the manga of that time fit this “effort, friendship, and victory” formula well, and in fact, since the birth of these words, readers have come to expect them, so I think this trend has become stronger and stronger. After all, that’s why they were selling so well.
However, for me personally, as well as the “effort, friendship, and victory”, I think that there is another major pattern in Weekly Jump that is unique to Jump.
It’s the “Law of Finding Friends”. The protagonist searches for friends, even if it is not intentional, and increases the number of friends by turning against each other or warming up friendships with potential friends, in other words, the story is based on focusing on gathering friends.
As an example, let’s take a look back at a past JUMP work.
Kinnikuman” started out as a comedy, but as it became a fighting manga, the enemy superheroes it defeated became its friends, a golden pattern.
In “Dragon Ball,” while you’re collecting balls, you’re getting friends. In “Dragon Ball,” former enemies such as Piccolo and Vegeta become friends, albeit at a distance.
In “Saint Seiya”, the four members of the Bronze Saint who are chasing after the stolen golden robe and the five members of Ikki, who were initially at odds with each other, somehow become a party.
In “Slam Dunk,” the main character, Hanamichi Sakuragi, and his rival, Kaede Rukawa, are at odds with each other, and a team of unique friends is formed.
In “One Piece,” Eiichiro Oda, the creator, has said in the past that he wanted to depict the gathering of friends, and the episodes of the gathering of friends are described in detail.
Most of the manga that have made a name for themselves in their time have brilliantly placed the “gathering of friends” as the initial axis of the story. There are others like “sakigake! Otokojuku”, “Naruto”, “Rurouni Kenshin”, and many others if you recall. Of course, there are works that fall into that category, and there are manga from other magazines that have this “gathering of friends” as their axis, but it’s only in Jump that all of its flagship works do so.
And the point is that it’s not enough to just have a group of friends. Each of the friends has their own quirks, and at first, they start out antagonizing each other, cheating each other, or simply not getting along. Then, as they defeat their common enemies, they become friends, or they come to understand each other by exchanging fists as enemies.
It is clear that “Demon Slayer” follows the pattern of Jump’s older works. When Tanjiro joins the Demon Slayer Corps, he begins to build a bond with his fellow demon slayers. Of course, the unique setting of “Demon Slayer” and the emotionally stimulating dialogues and stories are important, but basically, in the process of creating a long work, it is safe to say that this work follows the traditional Jump rule of “gathering friends”.
So why is Weekly Jump so obsessed with this “law of gathering friends”? It’s because the pattern sells, and if it sells, it means that there is something about this law of gathering friends that attracts people.
So, why does “Gathering Friends” attract people to watch it? It’s because we are social creatures, and we build our society by working together with others. No matter what you say, we can’t live alone, and it’s only by talking and doing things with others that we understand who we are, and we often get a sense of being alive by being involved with others. During the Corona disaster, I think there were many people who felt that not being able to see other people was so painful.
People are attracted to groups that look like they are having fun, groups where they can live, and groups that are attractive. We want to be a part of it, and we know that such attractive groups are often beneficial to the world.
However, this alone does not explain why people sympathize with the grouping of friends depicted in manga and anime, and why it is so popular.
The possibility is that most people want to be part of an attractive group, but in reality, they don’t belong to such a group.
It is true that most people want to be in a group where they can shine, whether at school or at work. However, most of the time, it is an empty group of people who just hang out together, a group of people with strict hierarchy, or a group of people pretending to have fun. Such tendencies may be particularly strong in the midst of the growing disparity in society. Many people want to be a part of a group where there is no absurd hierarchical relationship, where people work hard to improve each other and help each other, but everyone is somewhat cold and lonely, thinking that such a thing is hard to find. And it’s possible that Corona has added to that feeling.
From such a person’s point of view, the “gathering of friends” advocated by JUMP looks very appealing. Just watching it makes me feel like I’m a part of it, at least for that time, and I feel like it fills a void in my heart. When that happens, the characters and their words and actions become more and more appealing to me. When that happens, it’s only a matter of time before you become captivated by the work. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the strong longing of modern people for the existence of friends is one of the driving forces behind the huge success of “Demon Slayer.
And considering that it’s been a few years since the series was first serialized, I feel that the current boom is being supported by people who don’t normally read Jump but learned about it from the anime, rather than people who originally read Shonen Jump. If you don’t read Jump on a regular basis, you don’t know that Jump manga has been repeating the “gathering of friends” as a pattern, and that’s probably why you feel a fierce freshness to “Blade of the Demise”.
Also, this is an aside, but I feel that the fact that the series is already over and the last book hasn’t been released yet is another reason why the boom is accelerating. The fact that the series is already over and the last book hasn’t been released yet is another reason why the boom is accelerating. And because the final volume has not been released, people are anxious to see what will happen at the end.
Well, if you think about it, as soon as the last volume comes out in December and everyone has read it, the boom may go down a bit, but a boom will come to an end someday, right? Still, I’m sure that movie sequels will continue to be made in the future, so it looks like it will lead the Japanese animation industry for a while.
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