hiii! ＾• ω •＾ you might know me elsewhere as andrew, andrewwtca, or noor. this is my new account :D! I'm not using my @andrewwtca tumblr anymore, but you can still check that out if you want to see some of my old essays, fics, or posts
if you don't know me, hi, I'm noor <3 arab, raised muslim, autistic, adhd, lesbian, writer, nerd, progressive, and so on, I have collected many adjectives to describe myself. I am very fond of my words and books ^_^ I've spent the last many years being crazy mostly about:
and now I've been hit by the south park beam .𖥔 ݁ ˖ִ🛸༄˖°.
currently I'm probably looking at my kenny x oc board & listening to twice, ashnikko, & many other girlies. but trust, there are kenny fics coming up. I am very insane about him <3 new blond boy to torture! in the meantime, I've written a lot of stuff about hope and grief and love and soooo many gay people:
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
thanks for reading, hope to find old friends & new ones!
note after posting: I've never reread csm so there's a lot of things I misremember or have forgotten. don't take this as fact, this is just me processing thoughts after the ending through analysis of what I currently know. I'll add a couple of edits though if I realize I said something horribly wrong.
I saw someone over on twitter say that Chainsaw Man's ending is a huge spit in the face to survivors. now I'm not sure if they are or aren't a survivor, but considering my biggest attachment to Denji is through his hypersexuality, I thought this critique was interesting food for thought. this isn't a full analysis, just my thoughts and interpretation as a survivor.
it's really strange because it's essentially a happy ending version of "the victim can never be happy." there is a very common idea among lots of disabled characters especially traumatized and suicidal characters, that it's better if they were better off dead. that it would merciful. most bitterly, I think of Banana Fish's ending and the mangaka's following words in interviews.
that is essentially what happens at the end of Chainsaw Man: Pochita is like "shit Denji, you pick the worst decision at every single turn, and then you do it AGAIN, and then you end up picking a third decision that no one knew existed and was EVEN WORSE. we can't be doing this anymore. this isn't working." in a way, it's Pochita giving up on Denji.
I have not been fully caught up with CSM in a little bit. I couldn't bear every single chapter of Denji being abused worse and making worse choices. I caught up when we learned 232 would be the last chapter. so if I'm being quite honest, I can't necessarily blame Pochita for coming to this kind of conclusion.
but I didn't give up on Denji. I was waiting for his next comeback that I knew would come. part of what made reading CSM hard was seeing fan chatter online often not have any grace for Denji. I'm not at all saying Denji was not often the creator of the situations they would find themselves in and was not many times just straight up shitty lmao, but so many people started mocking that! claiming we're mothering and babying Denji. I saw so much of myself in Denji that I did not expect to see when I first started reading, and it hurt seeing people demonize him for it and then demonize us for being by his side. felt like being laughed at on the playground together.
I was on Denji's side. I didn't give up on him. Pochita did, though. Pochita saw everything and said I've only made your life worse.
which: pause. let's get something clear. it was never Pochita who made Denji's life worse. regardless of the more meta conditions to Denji's survival, Denji's problems in the Chainsaw Man manga happened because of...Chainsaw Man!!! isn't that crazy? Pochita is not Chainsaw Man is not Denji. Pochita was not the problem, Chainsaw Man and the entire life surrounding it was.
but fine, whatever Pochita, let's go with that. Pochita says, "I'm the common denominator in all your problems. this is never gonna work. we will never get a happy ending this way." and I hate that. I hate any story ever accepting defeat. I hate when they look at the victim and say you're too broken.
but thinking about it... that's kind of the exact opposite of what Pochita is saying.
we have the scene that was quite literally moments before Pochita and Denji meet. this is the picture painted: Denji's father is dead! Denji is now responsible for a debt of 700,000 yen (from when this chapter was published, that's a bit over 6,000 USD) and he has until tomorrow to get that money! the options incautiously given to Denji are prostitution, begging, or death.
but it's alright, we can all breath a sigh of relief because Pochita is there. Denji gets to live another day. and we all never thought twice about that scene. if asked, all we might have had to say was 'phew, good thing Pochita was there. now we get the rest of the manga.'
Pochita knows the situation that Denji was in. he knows perfectly what picture was painted. and yet Pochita still said, "you'd be better off without me."
as in, "yeah, you could survive that."
as in, "you would've made it."
and you know what?
Pochita was right. Denji made it all the way to the end.
so... is this that trope? is Pochita really saying that Denji's better off dead? is Pochita saying that Denji can never be happy?
no, what he's saying is even more baffling considering Denji's long run of bad decisions: child Denji could've earned that 700,000 yen. child Denji could've figured it out. child Denji could've survived.
at the end of the day, Pochita wasn't giving up on Denji. Pochita just believed in Denji so hard. Pochita was Denji's heart and saw Denji's dreams and saw Denji's choices and he knew Denji inside and out. looked at that and he said "yeah, kid. you're tough. you'll be alright."
to wrap back around to what I even started this post about, is this a spit in the face to survivors? to me, it doesn't feel like it. because if you think about it, it looks like Fujimoto traded one kind of sexual trauma for another.
note: next up, I say that Denji's isolation stemmed from his isolation - I think I just completely blocked out the beginning of the manga. I've done a little refresher and he's lonely from his isolation, but his hypersexuality truly started with her as she started grooming him.
Denji is hypersexual. part 2 undeniably shows this. this hypersexuality stems from Denji's life of intense isolation, not just of romantic relationships but any kind of relationship. Denji only had Pochita for companionship. this hypersexuality is what left him vulnerable to Makima's abuse followed by many, many other women. he accumulated more and more trauma with every new manipulator and had many all around bad sexual experiences.
if Denji's hypersexuality was a result of his isolation with Pochita, then removing Pochita from the equation could allow Denji to get closer to other people. something that catches my eye immediately is the starkly different way Denji carries himself in the new timeline. it's completely unrecognizable to the loud Denji we know.
by removing Pochita, Denji has now been removed from the path of much of his abuse. yeah, an argument could be made about how that's kind of shitty, your solution to dealing with your character's trauma and their trauma responses is by just erasing it, but then I think...how did Denji actually avoid that fate in the first place?
we have some pieces placed in front of us... Denji is isolated because of Pochita... Pochita is removed from Denji... Denji is now faced with a timeline where prostitution is offered as one his means as payment... judging by the fact that he ended up in the exact same situation, he didn't have any friends, family, or significant others. there's not many other options for how Denji could've possibly avoided that same social isolation.
note: I might challenge these thoughts after a reread. discerning what was Denji, what was Pochita, and what was Makima is future me's mission.
to summarize, Fujimoto decided that instead of making Denji so touch-starved that he ends up being abused from the hands of one woman to another, Denji would be a 'child prostitute.'* that's so Fujimoto.
*in quotations because no such thing exists. a prostitute is someone who "engages in sexual activity for payment." children cannot consent to sex, therefore cannot engage in any sexual activity. if a child is engaging in something sexual, that is rape, assault, harassment, and so on.
to be clear, that in of itself can still be critiqued. you can critique using another timeline to avoid addressing things, pacing, the interchangeability of these stories. but I think ultimately, when examined through the lens of Denji's sexual trauma, CSM's ending said Denji is a survivor and he's not a survivor in this timeline, but he's one in that timeline too. and I like that.
me too, Aki. feels good to win for once.
I think writing this has made me like the ending more, but I'm gonna need a lot of time to sit with that. it's amazing and it's horrible and we're so back and we're so over and it's peak and it's mid and it's slop and it's tragic and it's bittersweet and it's hopeful, and above all, we can agree Fujimoto got burnt out.
thanks for reading! I hope Denji goes down as one of the most complex and beloved shonen protagonists or we at least give him a little more grace ♡
I mean, the goal had always been to have the closest approximation Denji could have to a "normal" life. He was at his most content early in the manga I think, that period of time between the manga's start to either Kanata or Bomb. From there, things in Denji's life progressively began to unravel.
"Doesn't anyone want Denji's heart?" is something I think about a lot. Meta narratively-speaking, the through line with that is that Denji is inherently trapped by the story he's found himself the protagonist of. In Shonen, the only path to a normal life is to *not* be that at all
In the actual confines of the narrative, this means people won't see him as "Chainsaw Man," and will instead just see him as "Denji." It's only his heart now—a flawed, imperfect heart he inherited that has been healed by the people around him. While Pochita was able to do that, it also *trapped* him
I am a Fujimoto glazers until the day I die. Yes I think the ending was rushed, but it was very sweet and still in theme for what the story always was. It was never a normal shounen and this ending feels right
