Demon Slayer Trivia Quiz: Can You Pass It?

Trivia Quizzes Anime

Demon Slayer is set in Taisho-era Japan, roughly the 1910s, a period the series uses more deliberately than most fantasy anime bother to. Electric lights and streetcars have reached Tokyo, and a few days’ walk into the mountains people are still burning charcoal for a living and locking their doors after dark for reasons nobody in the city takes seriously anymore. Tanjiro Kamado sells charcoal, walks down to town, gets caught out overnight by snow, and comes home the next morning to find his family killed and his younger sister Nezuko turned into the exact kind of creature that did it. Koyoharu Gotouge’s manga ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from February 2016 to May 2020, two hundred and five chapters across twenty-three volumes, and the premise never really widens beyond that opening: a boy carrying his sister in a box, looking for a way to make her human again.

Ufotable, the studio behind the Fate adaptations, animates the series with heavy digital compositing layered over hand-drawn work, which is what gives the water and flame effects their painted, moving-woodblock quality rather than the usual flat cel look. Episode nineteen, broadcast in November 2019, is the moment that shift became impossible to ignore, and it turned a well-liked seasonal show into a phenomenon almost overnight. The follow-up film, Mugen Train, opened in Japanese cinemas in October 2020 under pandemic seating restrictions and still became the highest-grossing film in the country’s history, passing Spirited Away inside two months.

The supporting cast carries an unusual amount of the material. Zenitsu Agatsuma is a coward who faints under pressure and only fights properly while unconscious, executing Thunder Breathing techniques he cannot perform awake. Inosuke Hashibira wears a boar’s head as a mask, was raised in the mountains with no human contact, and treats every social situation as a fight he might be able to win. Sakonji Urokodaki, the retired swordsman who trains Tanjiro before the selection exam, carves a fox mask for each student he sends out and keeps the ones who do not come back. Kyojuro Rengoku, the Flame Hashira, appears in relatively few chapters and still ended up the emotional centre of the film that broke the box office record.

Underneath all of that is a rule set the story sticks to rigidly. Demons regenerate almost anything, cannot be killed by ordinary steel, and are destroyed by sunlight or by decapitation with a Nichirin blade forged from ore mined near-permanently in sunlight. Every demon in existence traces back to Muzan Kibutsuji, which makes the whole thing a single bloodline rather than an infestation, and Nezuko’s eventual resistance to sunlight is significant precisely because it is the one thing Muzan has spent a thousand years failing to achieve. The Hashira, nine swordsmen at the top of the Demon Slayer Corps, each hold a breathing style derived from the original Sun Breathing, which is why the styles behave less like superpowers and more like a family tree.

The questions cover the whole of that: who trains Tanjiro, which breathing style belongs to which swordsman, what the strongest rank in the Corps is called, what colour Nezuko’s eyes and hair ribbon are, and who wrote and drew the manga. Each one is listed again with its correct answer under the quiz, so the weak spots are easy enough to place, whether they sit in the early training arc or somewhere deep in the Infinity Castle.