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Man arrested for allegedly urinating during Demon Slayer movie at Surprise theater
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this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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Wait, Demon Slayer is a children's movie?
You know what, this is actually genuinely debatable, there are strong arguments on both sides.
I don't think it's appropriate for kids, but there are kids at my niblings' elementary school walking around with Demon Slayer backpacks.
No, it's a children's movie. It's fine to like it anyway -- I'll watch it at some point most likely -- but it's clearly a children's movie.
It's literally R rated, children aren't allowed in the theater
That would probably need to be explained as a difference in rating systems, since the movie wasn't made in America. Demon Slayer was a shonen series in the foremost shonen magazine, the target demo is explicitly adolescent boys.
The equivalent is super hero comics. Target audience: like 10-15 year old boys.
Young adult is a marketing term for 12 year olds, because 12 year olds don't like being called children even though they are.
I didn't say that. Sesame Street is for babies. Hunger Games is for children. Those are different things.
It's not a bit, that is literally the American equivalent of shonen manga. Easy to read action slop for 12 year old boys.
Do you think Sesame Street is intended for 12 year olds? It's for kids who are like 2 - 5. There are many differences in children as they develop, meaning "children's media" is a pretty broad umbrella and it would be very unusual to have something that is seriously targeting everyone from 2 - 17. Sesame Street is for children and Hunger Games is for children (Is this strange to you? It was extremely popular in middle and high schools), but that doesn't mean they're for the same children.
We have different words to describe things in different ways, e.g. we have "YA" as a somewhat narrower demographic distinction, but there are various reasons to organize things according to different sets of umbrellas, and "children's media" serves functions like indicating to parents that stuff they can get for their kid is over in these bins, and they should look at the individual age ratings by product if they want more specific information. Children's media also tends to serve some sort of pedagogical or socializing function that is less-common in adult-oriented media (and this is even true of a lot of shonen, even if a lot of it is gross isekai/harem trash too).
I'm so confused at the tone of indignation you have. I read plenty of shonen work, maybe more than you, and there's no shame in it. Art is art.
Then let me repeat the subsequent sentences:
I've been exhibiting a silly bias that because I'm past a phase, I expect that everyone else either is past it too or should be even though you're probably also a bit younger than me . . .
If you'll allow me the silly comparison, you're effectively doing tailism. I'm sure that you know that media's primary market being children does not invalidate it as art or mean that it's invalid to be interested in it if you're not a child. There's plenty of media, including in the west, that is written with the intention of adults and children alike having something to enjoy from it, and also children's media should still be good art that isn't held to a lower standard, but that's a different discussion. By choosing to basically completely accept the backwards framing they have but then just make a frivolous argument that something that is plainly mostly targetting teenagers isn't actually for children, you inevitably aren't going to make much progress (and even less so if your best argument is "his whole family got killed by a demon and there was like blood everywhere man!" which is the argument a teenager would make that their favored media is "mature," oblivious to how such a line of argumentation would look absurd to an adult).
I compare it to tailism because tailism is ceding ground to reactionaries, endorsing their ideas and proposals because you think that it will get you accepted instead of agitating to raise consciousness, to make the positions that you really believe in more popular. Art is broadly not politics* as much as cultural critics wish it was, but in this case I think the attitude you describe others as having is genuinely culturally backwards and I doubt you'd disagree, so don't feed into it!
If for some reason it's important to you that someone watches anime -- and that's fine, there are good reasons to care -- you really should be having a more thoughtful conversation with them about what their claim even means and what its significance is. An accessible framing might be: What do you like in media? What do you dislike? What are you trying to get out of it? What does the medium have to do with those questions? If they make an effort to really answer those questions, it shouldn't be too hard to explain why some series (maybe not your favorite, but one you know) might appeal to them, and if they like that one, they'll be at least a little more open to others (perhaps even your favorite!).
*Which is not to say that it's not political, of course it is, but it is not itself the political arena most of the time, and no amount of art can substitute for actual politics.
:israel-cool?
In their case, they don't even go to the theater. They just take their kids to the border with Gaza and watch it get bombed.
Right, it's children's comics
Right, if you mean it in the YA sense, i.e. a demo of children
"Shonen" is literally a demographic designation, the term means "young male" (specifically here young adolescence). If that's not the target demo, it's not shonen. It can be action, slice of life, mystery, whatever, what makes it a "shonen" is that it's primarily intended for young males. It can have deliberate appeal to other audiences -- and despite(?) being tremendously sexist, Demon Slayer has a huge female following as well as an adult one -- but you are flatly incorrect to say that it is not intended for teenage boys.
You're making it sound more graphic than it is. There are dead bodies and blood everywhere in one scene, but it's not like there are entrails or something really graphic, it's just limp bodies with blood everywhere. Even if it was more graphic, that doesn't really address the point regardless because you're projecting cultural assumptions in a silly way, and you can easily find things that are more morbid aimed at still-younger audiences, like some of the work of Roald Dahl
I said "gruesome" because that's more pertinent to the age rating than something being conceptually dark. For example, in Dahl's telling of Cinderella, one of the stepsisters hacks her own foot apart with a knife to get the stub to fit into the glass slipper. "Revolting Rhymes," where that scene is from, has a lot of other stuff like that.
I generally wouldn't say that Dahl's work is all that conceptually dark, it's mostly in the direction of shock, but for example there's an aside in "The Witches" about a girl who is trapped in a painting which stays in the possession of her parents, who watch her age within the painting over the course of years (changing position, implying that she is conscious even though she only appears at a given time as a static image) until eventually she stops appearing, implicitly ending up as a corpse that has fallen out of view.
But you can find no shortage of material that is aimed at children that is much conceptually darker as well, most obviously in historical fiction (look at many stories about the Civil War or WWII) and semi-historical fiction like the Book Thief, but I'd even consider Coraline to be much darker at times than that scene in Demon Slayer. Gaiman (who I think is a pretty good author but, besides being personally monstrous, also just fucking sucks sometimes as an author when he's not writing for children) has a lot of work that's pretty dark, another example being Graveyard Book, which I'd say skews on the younger side of YA but has more or less the expected level of morbidness, starting with the protagonist's family being killed not by a demon but a dude with a knife while the protagonist is still a toddler.
Another one I read as a teen that mercifully wasn't by Gaiman was the Thin Executioner, which has some pretty brutal deaths and fates-worse-than-death, like I think some guys who are literally named Bush and Blair after that Bush and that Blair end up fused into a cliff face while remaining conscious and aware, seemingly just left to suffer forever. More than their deaths though, what I tend to remember is how they killed people, because they had a "magic trick" with some balls that had metal triangles affixed to them. They would toss the ball at their target's throat, it bounces back, and they reveal that the triangle is gone. The audience is then directed to look at the victim's throat, which now has a triangular bulge visibly pressing out of it as they choke and sputter before dying.
Chainsaw Man really pushes the shonen thing because it really does have strong seinen elements (including things much more interesting than just the gore and nudity), but overall I'd say probably yes, it's targeted mainly at teenage boys. Naturally, it also probably won't be received that way in America, but that's how the manga was written and the anime is pretty faithful to it.
To be clear, I do think it's a) on the oldest end of the demo and b) pretty edgy even for that, but again, see the content that I described before, which is variously for kids from about 8 - 14. I can see my claim about chainsaw man being regarded as a little controversial and honestly I myself don't really understand how it gets published in Jump when compared to all the other series there, but even if we just assume that I'm wrong, I think you're taking a very narrow view of what children's media is. Even so-called YA is still intended to be pretty accessible to tweens and agreeable to their parents, which is a more restrictive in America than in some other places (including Japan). Chainsaw Man is I think a more reasonable depiction of what it looks like to make media aimed firmly at brainrotten teenage boys specifically.
Come to think of it, it was pretty clever to make the Reze arc a movie since that's the one arc that has a substantial degree of romance, so it could help them get a broader audience.
idk I've never seen it, just assumed it was shounen stuff since kids were in the theater lol
It is mainly a children's movie, though it has an adult following too
It's considered kid-friendly (I think, at least like 12-18 kids) in Japan since the manga is considered to be shonen which is for teenage boys. In the West, it's often considered to be mature, hence why it's rated R.
The series has a lot of blood and violence and general dark themes, this is considered appropriate for kids in Japan but not appropriate for kids in the West.
Either way, as others have mentioned, there are tons of people outside the target demographic that adore it, such as adults and little kids.