HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY
The thing about the Chainsaw Man part 2 ending debate I didn't bother to say earlier was that it was framed as if it were between people with basic literacy and shounen fans. So-called literate readers of manga can interpret thematic content and so like the ending. Shounen fans can only interpret literal events, so view the ending as sudden and nonsensical, hate Fujimoto for insulting the genre and them for liking the genre, and wanted a wish fulfillment ending instead.
Actually, the ending is thematically nonsensical, and wish fulfillment. It follows nicely from the literal events in the story, and checks off the things the fanbase desires in a row.
The ending of Part 2 requires you to believe these two theses:
Chainsaw Man is a story about a teen boy, Denji, with no familial connections working a dead end job who dies and makes a deal with his """dog""" Pochita to be reborn with the tremendous power to transform into a guy named Chainsaw Man; Pochita then becomes his heart. Because of this tremendous power, many people wish to control this teen boy, and do this by meeting his basic needs: family, friendship, food, and his pathetic and bestial sexual desire. Although he can overcome individual enemies and manipulatrices, his desires remain the same and insatiable.
Since he cannot stop being himself, the only way for him to overcome this dilemma by sacrificing this power, which he is morally unable to achieve and thus needs to be forced to do. Once he sacrifices this power, he remains the same person. People still manipulate him in the same way, but he enjoys this. It no longer reaches the level of constant orgiastic violence obviating anything good in his life.
Both of these things are stated rather plainly and constantly across Part 2. The first thesis is certainly ubiquitous across Part 1; if I were nicer, I would say that the audience deserves to be forgiven for taking the text at its word.
I'm not nice, though! So many people convince themselves that they're "media literate" (pukes) because when a text says X plainly they can repeat X back, and many people can't do that, so they're better than everyone else! It's as if they're not still beneath the lowest hurdle: guessing what a text is setting out to do, judging yourself if it achieves that, and then reading and rereading to adjust your guess and your judgement.
Chainsaw Man part 1 involves a cycle of battles against pesky misbehaving devils who each represent the fear of a concept and a process of sexual discovery: Makima, Himeno, Power, Reze. Makima puts Denji in her Public Safety Division and uses his lust to control him; resolution with her must be delayed until the climax. Himeno is obviously only toying with Denji and is killed early on. Reze is with the Soviet Union and wants to manipulate him to rip his heart out, but Denji defeats her. After escaping, she catches genuine feelings, which means she needs to be stomped out and enslaved by Makima. Power is basically asexual and cements herself in the friend category alongside Aki. Aki becomes the Gun Fiend; Power is slaughtered in front of Denji to cement his role as Makima's dog.
Denji finds things to hang onto, they are destroyed, he is left with almost nothing.
Part 1 then prescribes a different solution. Makima, the devil representing Control) is incapable of seeing Denji as Denji, only as Chainsaw Man, Makima admires for his ability to kill other devils en masse, consume them, and extirpate their concept from the Earth. Denji genuinely loves Makima. To defeat her, Denji rips Pochita from his heart; Pochita constitutes himself as Chainsaw Man to duel her, drawing her whole focus. Denji sneaks up behind her, kills her with a chainsaw, cuts her up, meal preps her, and then eats her over the course of weeks to prevent her from reconstituting herself and renewing the battle.
Although Aki remains dead and must be mourned, Makima reincarnates as a young girl called Nayuta. Pochita said that Makima wanted a family, so Denji is happy to take her in; he awaits the reincarnation of Power.
A pretty simple story, huh? I mean obviously, it's in Shounen Jump. It's pretty optimistic, too. Does Part 2 demonstrate that this optimism is uncalled for?
In my opinion, not even slightly. It presents its thesis that the only way for Denji to become happy is to give up his power as if part 1's ending did not exist. Before doing this, it spends maybe just under a hundred chapters retracing the cycle of Denji succumbing to basal desire and being manipulated for this.
The new protagonist, Asa, becomes a basal puppet of the War devil, who seeks to crush Chainsaw Man and turn him into a weapon so she can reduce the world to eternal conflict. Her sister (and Makima and Nayuta's sister), the Death devil, wants Chainsaw Man to slaughter her before she annihilates the world; she manipulates a church of Chainsaw Man worshippers to acquire this goal. There's a girl called Fumiko who was sexually abused and so made a contract with the STD Devil to transmogrify those who fuck her into puppet copies of herself, a sort of self parody or hypertrophied form of all of the sexually exploited and sexually exploiting girls in the series.
Nayuta never consciously wanted a family, and thinks she never loved Denji; she remembers what Makima achieved and wants to dominate Denji in the same way to make her legacy proud. She is killed at some point to make Denji sad. Actually, Pochita, who said in Part 1 that he really wanted a family and human comforts too, now tells Denji that becoming Chainsaw Man was a mistake in the first place, and eats himself. Why did Pochita change his mind? Was he really selfish for wanting all of that? He had succeeded in Part 1?
Wait, why the fuck are you asking those questions? Are you stupid? Fujimoto just wrote 100 chapters of Denji being unable to escape the basic arc structure of wacko devil and sexy manipulating girl and evil social desire and desire for infamy and sex and sex, are you stupid? Can you not read? No don't look at the ending of Part 1 which shows Denji turning lust into friendship and familial love and doing Chainsaw Man's special thing himself I mean it was stated that Denji is a dog dominated by his id so you have to believe it. If you don't you are literally illiterate.
Everything is reversed; nothing that Part 1 stated is refuted. There is suddenly a new world where Nayuta is alive but takes Makima's place and Power, who Denji never makes a conscious effort to search for during Part 2, is alive and the one who saves Denji. Aki is still dead though.
Of course, there are many events and literal details that I've skipped. Generally, when something makes thematic sense, a work keeps making sense when these details are omitted?
I kinda don't make a habit of talking to people outside of my small social circle but in my experience fans of Part 2 have been incredibly evasive when I ask them how this makes thematic sense and try to lay it out. Maybe I'm just bad at lining things out. To repeat, it seems that they read the literal statements about themes, took them for granted without evaluating them, and then convinced themselves that they were smarter than shounen fans who love powerscaling and dismiss anything complicated as 'themes and such.'
But aren't the basic shounen fans more correct here? These people literally do believe anything is permissible if you say it's thematic, that there are no standards if there is a message as if having a message is something special and not writing 101.
You hear ridiculous things like "deconstruction of the shounen genre" too. We will allow deconstruction to mean 'harsh internal criticism', we're descriptivists and not prescriptivists here!
What's being interrogated in Chainsaw Man, though? If you were actually a shounen protagonist, societal forces would manipulate you, you'd be dominated by your adolescent desires and jerked around? Kinda trivially true but besides the point and Chainsaw Man has no non-basic depiction of societal forces, however enamoured leftist media critics of all tendencies were by the War devil's America worship and transformation of states into physical weapons.
There's no point in being invested in cosmology and rankings of power or fantasising about heroism? I don't really see how this is shown at all. For cosmology and ranking, Chainsaw Man pays very little attention to things that categorisers love in other shounen like worldbuilding or powerscaling even in the more coherent Part 1 and yet is loved by the fandom fandom so very much. For fantasies, Part 1 shows someone destitute and so has good reason to fantasise about suddenly being raised in stature, and then has them overcome the unbelievable aspect of those fantasies create something for himself, acquire a little sister, finally be able to go to school. Part 2 doesn't refute this at all, I could say it a million times.
This all feels really obvious to me. My friends who still bothered to follow Part 2 came similar conclusions without conferring with me. Apparently, lots of other people haven't gotten here. Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm delusional. Until then, I think I'll be fit into EITHER the 'themes and such' box OR the 'shounen fan' box, no in betweens, hehe.
sketchbook passes + my friend's entire midterm project that helped me jumpstart this stuff LMAO thank you irl for letting me rip part of ur physical Hagia Sophia section/reflected ceiling plan for background purposes
What if you were born into a world that hated you and saw you as an inferior imitation of a person, but the world that belonged to you had been there, infinitely close, all along...?
like it seems clear that i argue in a manner that's kind of unexpected for internet discussions. i can't tell if that's because i'm obviously always chatting nonsense or because people have gotten too used to repeating discourse cycles where everyone fits inside a finite number of boxes but somehow i genuinely beat the pattern. i think it's the latter because people are always projecting stupid basic arguments onto mine but then it's hard to imagine anyone can beat the cycle of discourse. let alone me.
andulkaphoto
2087
titsay
tangentwithtanner
pixelskylines
