hi! i know you're currently doing the positive fandom asks and this is kind of the opposite of that, but i really wanted to ask, what it is in particular you don't like about CSM's second saga? i feel vaguely disdatisfied with both pacing and characters of it myself, which keeps me uninvested, but Orc can only identify the fact it FEELS like things just happen for no reason, not the actual causes of why :( and after my first anon you said it broke "the implicit promise" of part 1, and i would really like to hear more about what you meant by that!
So, apart from not being invested in any of the new characters invested beyond Asa and Yoru, who I feel ended up being a lot of wasted potential?
We're repeating Denji's emotional beats from part one, where he looses everything but gets back up and keeps fighting. It's the same thing we already went through in the final arc. However...
Now that he's lost everything AGAIN and Fujimoto's back on his absolutely anyone can die vibe, but with far less character development, there's no reason for us to get invested in anything Denji might be fighting for. In large part because...
He shouldn't have killed Nayuta. She marked a change to the cycle of violence that was the Control Devil. Now it's... just going to keep going, I guess? Additionally, it nullifies the big emotional beat at the end of part one. Nayuta dies, Denji backslides, it was all for nothing. That's the thing that made me stop writing for part one, and with it DYW; it took something I had loved so much and made it feel so incredibly empty. The only reason I think I may be able to go back to DYW is because the setting is so different.
On that note. If anyone reading this misses my Chainsaw Man fics, please consider reading Control, War, Change. I know it's not the characters you want, but it's a Chainsaw Man setting and very much uses to emotions, tones, and themes of my old CSM fics. Also, I intentionally wrote it in a way where you can understand it without any prior familiarity with Hazbin, just like Tokyo Ghoul and DYW.