Demon Slayer Season 3 - Mitsuri Kanroji's Love Breathing Forms & Origins Explained

In the world of "Demon Slayer," members of the Demon Slayer Corps utilize a variety of different "Breathing Styles" in order to dispatch demons. Every Breathing Style utilizes a practice called "Total Concentration Breathing," a technique allowing swordsmen to increase their blood flow, oxygen intake, heart rate, and body temperature in order to gain superhuman levels of strength and speed.

Demon Slayers use Breathing Styles to master specific swordsmanship styles connected to natural elements like fire or water, often granting the swordsman unique abilities and powers that mimic those elements. One great example is the way series lead Tanjiro Kamado (Natsuki Hanae) uses Water Breathing to enhance his adaptability in battle, landing sword strikes that mimic tumbling waterfalls and vicious whirlpools.

Although all Breathing Styles can be traced back to a primary natural element, we've also seen several evolved Breathing Styles that center around ideas or concepts. A few of these more inventive Styles include Beast Breathing, Sound Breathing, and, of course, Love Breathing — the latter of which is featured heavily throughout "Demon Slayer" Season 3. Love Breathing is the signature fighting style of the Love Hashira, Mitsuri Kanroji (Kana Hanazawa), and was developed specifically by Kanroji to fit her unique build and skill set. Here's everything you need to know about Love Breathing.

Although Love Breathing is a swordsmanship technique that mimics the very concept of Love, like most Breathing Styles it is derived from one of five primary elements; Water, Flame, Thunder, Stone, and Wind.

We know from the "Demon Slayer" manga that Mitsuri Kanroji developed Love Breathing as a branch of Flame Breathing, which she learned extensively while training with the Flame Hashira Kyojuro Rengoku (Satoshi Hino). Because Flame Breathing attacks are meant to evoke the "burning" sensation of fire, it makes sense that an overly sentimental person like Kanroji (who has spent her entire life seeking true love) would be able to equate that style to the passionate emotions of Love.

On top of Love Breathing's connection to Kanroji's emotional nature, this particular Breathing Style was also developed to complement her unique physiology. In Season 3, we learn Mitsuri Kanroji was born with a superhuman level of muscle density, which makes her extraordinarily strong while still being slight and flexible. Thus, Love Breathing was designed specifically to take advantage of Kanroji's agile frame and extraordinary strength, allowing her to deal devastating blows at a blinding speed.

It becomes immediately obvious when we see her utilize this style in her fight against Upper Rank Four, Hantengu (Toshio Furukawa) that Love Breathing was designed specifically with Mitsuri Kanroji's unique build in mind.

In this fight, Kanroji uses Love Breathing to grant herself an inhuman level of gymnastic ability while fighting, allowing her to skillfully weave between blows and twist through the air while landing strikes all over her opponent's body. The incredible agility afforded by Love Breathing is further enhanced by Kanroji's special Nichirin Sword, which has a pink edge and swings around like a whip to deliver devastation across the battlefield. While this sword is not required for one to practice Love Breathing (we actually saw Kanroji use a regular sword in "Rengoku Kyōjurō: Gaiden"), it gives Kanroji a remarkable level of range and flexibility in battle.

Love Breathing's blinding speed and overwhelming power are meant to embody the passion and emotion of Love itself, represented by the vivid animation of those attacks. As with all Breathing Styles, Love Breathing users are able to visualize their attacks as a representation of certain concepts. In the case of Mitsuri Kanroji, this means her attacks generate green and pink sparks that mimic the unique color of her hair or leave behind trails of bright pink wherever she has slashed.

While Mitsuri Kanroji's base attacks are more than enough to take out most demons, the most powerful attacks in her arsenal are the five "Forms" of Love Breathing she has mastered.

Thus far, we know Love Breathing has six different Forms that can be used during battle, though we've only seen five of them in the anime. When using "First Form: Shivers of First Love," Kanroji rushes forward and delivers multiple strikes with one swing that "shivers" while passing through the target. "Second Form: Love Pangs" is once again a single swing that contorts Kanroji's whiplike sword to slice the target from multiple angles at once.

"Third Form: Catlove Shower" forces Kanroji to jump into the air and deliver a cascade of arcing slashes in the empty air below her, which explode into pink and green sparks after the fact. "Fifth Form: Swaying Love, Wildclaw" is an attack where Kanroji backflips into the air and then rockets back towards the ground, spinning her sword to create a pink tornado of slashes on the way down. "

"Sixth Form: Cat-Legged Winds of Love" seems like just a simple downward slash in the anime but actually has a different effect in the manga, where the true power of the Sixth Form is that it allows Kanroji to whip and retract her sword at lightning speed to create a volley of constant overhead slashes. In any case, it will certainly be interesting to see if Kanroji uses the full power of the Sixth Form in Season 4 — and if we'll ever see the mysterious Fourth Form of Love Breathing, which has never been revealed in either the "Demon Slayer" anime or manga.