Parallel world Manga Artist-Chapter 236: Discussion - I

Haruki was far from alone in his thoughts.

In fact, even Rei himself, when the Demon Slayer anime had first come out in his previous life, had watched the early episodes with one hand on the remote and a running internal commentary 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 mean the work was boring. That was a logical error that a surprising number of people made. Ultraman had been running for decades. The moment 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 something 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 time 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 shame, 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 comment 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 anime 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 same when the Hunter x Hunter manga first started serializing. The same kinds of comments 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 become acceptable to judge whether an anime 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-time screenwriter with no name attached to it, there would be a crowd of anime 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." 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

"It cannot be helped. Shirogane-sensei is the single most dominant figure in the Japanese anime 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 moment. 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 anime merchandise 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 comments 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 comment section an hour after the first episode airs. The ones who show up immediately with coordinated negativity are not disappointed viewers. They are something else entirely.

And the standard they are applying, judging an entire anime series on the basis of its first episode, would result in ninety-nine percent of all anime 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 time. If the quality stays flat, come 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 me 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 me 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 emerge.

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, arguments 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 volume.

"There really are a lot of people in the Japanese anime industry who want to see me 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 same opportunity and all arriving at the same moment to take it.

The thinking was not difficult to understand. Rei had been elevated to something close to a god in the Japanese anime 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 underperformed 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 became the accepted truth.

The anime 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 become one of the most beloved works in the history of the medium.

Whatever darkness these coordinated attacks could generate around the anime 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 time 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.