Tldr at the bottom
Is anybody else really confused about how they've handled this specific Hashira in the anime?
I want to compare her with another Hashira who Ufotable can't get enough of: Muichiro.
For context, I like these two equally. These two Hashira have a lot in common. Of course they both make their debut in Season 3, and both are awesome. That said, I recall being frustrated at a few of the manga panels Mitsuri had being replaced with her comedically crying. Muichiro was fine though, even though he had clearly outshown her here. It's fine though, Mist breathing is cool af.
Fast forward to Hashira Training Arc, and I didn't really expect much from either of them. They both had the quickest of moments in the arc. Muichiro and Mitsuri had equal screentime in the manga, and both were kinda irrelevant. I definitely was eager to see how they would expand on them though.
Muichiro literally had 1 manga panel dedicated to his training, and 8 panels in total. Well, here he gets an entire episode dedicated to him. Weaving in side stories, his hobbies of paper airplanes, expanding upon the whole training he provides Tanjiro and the other slayers, heck, even extra training with Obanai and Sanemi.
They even kidnapped his swordsmith and brought him back to show how dedicated Muichiro was to his work! This episode was a full Muichiro: Origin story.
After seeing that I was really excited to see how they would expand with Mitsuri's training. Muichiro's episode was wearing thin by the end of it (last 6 minutes being dedicated to paper airplanes scene that literally did not expand upon anything character wise), but it was clear they were going to give Muichiro the full episode, just like they did with Uzui before. And so I was looking forward to seeing what they did with Mitsuri as well.
For perspective, Muichiro had 8 total panels and 1 page dedicated to his flash in the pan training. Mitsuri had 11 panels and a page and a half. They're basically identical in the manga.
Muichiro gets a whole episode in the anime. Mitsuri gets 2 minutes.
2 minutes. After a full episode of Uzui, and a full episode of Muichiro, the Love Hashira, Rengoku's Tsuguko, gets 2 minutes of training. And they didn't even add anything either. They did an exact adaptation and moved on, with no interest in expanding upon her training.
What... why? Why did we get 6 minutes of Muichiro tossing a paper airplane when we could have had an expanded food eating contest with Mitsuri? Or some sort of expansion on the value of flexibility training? It would have definitely been more useful than... whatever Muichiro was doing, scaring those cadets to death.
I like Muichiro, but his episode was probably the lowest point of the season. And what's crazy is that it could have been easily fixed by just handing the last few minutes to Mitsuri, but an active storyboard choice was made to have a paper airplanes arc the size of Gyomei's backstory instead of just having Mitsuri on screen for longer. I feel like some producer has an extreme bias for Muichiro, and it's coming at an active detriment to the story because it keeps punting away the Hashira who shared his screentime in these last two arcs, that being Mitsuri.
Tldr: Ufotable clearly loves some Hashira, but Mitsuri is not one of them, as she gets the bare minimum at best. Muichiro fans ate this season, but Mitsuri fans were left starving. Don't think the anime will fix it moving forward, and am just disappointed at the storyboard decision to completely sideline a Hashira who is very important to Tanjiro in favor of other characters who already have enough screentime.
