KnY is basically a Ufotable production as far as almost all fans are concerned. The manga is TRASH, one of the worst modem battle shounen, but quality doesn’t matter, what matters is art, color palette, designs and animation. Ufotable could have made anything into their next hit franchise, but chose KnY probably because it was easy / cheat to get and it had an interesting visual style their artists knew they could work with. That’s all. The worst thing about KnY is how fucking AWFUL the character writing is. Surface-level, childish shit for those characters which do get developed to any degree, but mostly characters get NO development outside of their final fight flashbacks. This is made especially painful because the DESIGNS invoke the imagination of there being rich characters to explore, but which are NEVER explored. All of the Moons exist solely to fight the protagonists and die. All of the Hashira exist to do a few cool shounen battle scenes, and that’s it.

For example, why does everyone fucking worship Kokushibo? Because he’s Demon Kenshin, so everyone wants him to BE Kenshin — but his role in the narrative is to have a fight scene that is sufficiently impressive, and then die. It’s pure trash. To use Kenshin as an example of a much better battle shounen, was Shishioh’s role just to have a fight scene then die? No, he existed as a character not only to the audience, but also with a history with those around him, how he interacted with them in the past, influenced them and is seen by them. But in this trash, a Kenshin who lived for over 400 years has NO character or history outside of his one flashback in the final battle. It’s pure, low-grade trash that’s so bad BECAUSE it prompts the audience to expect more, but shits on them instead.