#character study ig

[jamereadsmanga]

"If Denji was a girl, people would take his SA seriously"

I'm sorry, what alternate dimension do you live in where people take women's experiences of sexual violence seriously? What life did you live that you somehow managed to find chainsaw man without touching a single manga or anime? How did you manage to even draw this conclusion at all.

You do understand that the reason people don't take SA seriously is because it happens to women right? Sexual violence is very feminized in society as is seen as a natural consequence of being a woman, so no people wouldn't care more if Denji was a woman, they would care even less and even blame her.

The reason people don't care about Denji's abuse is not because he is a man, it's because he is a disenfranchised man. The reality is that the reason people don't care about female victims of sexual violence is because it is seen as apart of having a marginalized identity, in this case being a woman. If you are some who lacks social power in any meaningful way, your body is the property of your superior and anything that they do to you is justified and a necessity for maintaining the system. Denji being a minor, mentally ill, poor and a hybrid (a csm unique identity) strips him of any sort power and validates any abuse he experiences.

The only reason people end up feeling outraged is because they see SA as a solely gendered experience and inherently sexual and not an assertion of power and dominance. So no Denji's victimhood is not overlooked because he is a man, it's because his other marginalized identities prevent him from accessing the social power associated with being a man to the point that women are able to exert power over him.

Furthermore, the reason why certain fans just flat out ignore the abuse and go as far as romanticizing the abuse is because shounen manga relies on romanticizing abuse and marginalization. so many shounen stories frame marginalization as an independent failure and that the masculine thing to do is brute force your way out of it and reclaim your power as a man. In most cases it focuses on class and fictional structures but in chainsaw man it uses real marginal identities and refuses to just let Denji will his way out of it. Because Fujimoto refused to treat social inequality as personal failure, Denji will continue to suffer because marginalization is not an independent choice.

Then there are the people that solely view Denji as a man and therefore believes he intrinsically holds all the power and therefore whatever happens is his doing because that is a fundamental quality of shounen. Your protagonist is not a victim, just a man going through hardship to make himself strong by the end. It is his story, therefore whatever happens is what he wanted and if he didn't want that to happen then he would do something about it. And I'm not even going to touch rape and sv against female characters today.

Also, I regularly see people complaining about his lack of growth but how can he grow when his situation has not changed. his material conditions are the same as they were when makima found him. was he supposed to manifest boundaries out of thin air?

Rape and sexual violence is not about gender or sexuality, it is about power. It is how you establish and affirm your position within a society. Denji's constant experience of sexual (and of other forms) violence is not overlooked because he is a man, it's overlooked because people subconsciously believes he deserves it because his multiple marginal identities frames him as a failure of a man. You are not doing Denji a favour by centering his gender in this conversation when there are actual forces working against him.

[divinecockroack]

Do you ever think about og Ning Yingying?

Do you think Ning Yingying, naive and young and sweet grieves , upon the death of her old master in the Palace of the man who slaughtered him ?

Do you think she knew her insistence that he never touched her will be disregarded ? (Its never implied canonically that she claimed her master to bear inappropriate feelings towards her , it was a tidbit added by the Palace Master to ingratiate his image of a lecher even more , no prosttitute is questioned , no other documents about his slave contract or even Qiu haitang's origin is presented . This is a stage and Ning Yingying has no place ). Do you think she was angry and hurt and she wanted to save her shidi when she couldn't before ? Do you think it never occurred to her that her shifu , great prominent and untouchable could have ever required saving ?

She was cajoled by Luo Binghe . Who was lost for five years . Who she'd effectively raised . Who she loved , her shidi and then grieved , alone on a peak that celebrated his death . Do you think she took her anger , braided it into a thick chord and suffocated her younger self ? Do you think that when her little shidi came back , dark robed and angry like the caricatures of fallen gods , his mark of sin as brilliant as the blood she wiped off him when he was little , when she too , was little , was hopeful . And she's been angry for so long . At injustice to him by the shifu she holds such regard for . At the disregard to her personally simply because she's only a ditzy girl , she found comraderie? Hand in hand she loved him , as she had all these years. Her grief making a desperate woman out of her she agrees to wed him . To do whatever he says . That she was empathized with , no matter how false , for once. And she would do her utmost to uphold it .

Do you think when her sect razes in flames and screams of her shidimei and shige ring in her ears and her shidi , Husband now , comes covered in ashes and his other , other wives beside her follow him gleeful at the carnage she realises that it was never about justice . That's she was implicitly involved in burning down her home with innocent people inside ? That her shidi , Husband only wanted revenge. That's he's not who she remembers? That she was , and still is a tool . It only changed hands . And he intends to use her to further doom the man who raised her .

Do you think Ning Yingying finds trophies from his shifu's house in her husband's rooms . Do you think she does not know how to grieve the people she'd stopped loving long ago but she was wrong about it ? Because Ning Yingying loved her sect , loved her shifu , loved the Qing Jing disciples . They were a family , through Luo Binghe had never become a part of it . Even if she began resenting then , she never did stop loving them .

Do you think she looks at Liu Mingyan and wants to kill her ? The traitor to her own sect , the girl who killed her own shifu , who got Ning Yingying's shifu killed , married to her husband not for live , not for aid but simply for revenge . Do you think she finds the anger turned grief turned rage inside her once shimei and finds a twisted sort of empathy there ? Do you think she flinches at her sight , knowing she could have become that ?

Do you think Liu Mingyan despises Ning Yingying's Qing Jing greens that she'd taken to wearing lately , now that the insurmountably exhausting size and drama of the Harem keeps increasing. Do you think it's a way of somehow , somehow rekindling her friendship, her love with her husband , who brings home new women every week ? Or is it her own quiet rebellion? Her own way of grieving ? Because Ning Yingying is exhausted and this is all she can do .

What does she make of Qiu haitang ? Does she realise the similarities between them ? Does she realise that she was a placeholder to her shifu ? That even to him she'd been but a tool , a thing . That her shifu had much regards for the woman who doomed him to a death worse than that of a pig ? Does she weep ? Does she try to change herself desperately ?

Do you think she ever finds courage to visit the water prisons that holds her Master ? Alive or dead or otherwise ?

Do you think once Luo Binghe returns from the other world , he spends more time with her than ever before? Do you think it's her cold eyes ? Her stolen fans painted by her Master's undefeated hand ? Do you think she becomes, in a desperation to change herself, someone else ? ( And who else could she becomes but him ? )

I am the shape you made me . Filth teaches filth . Father .

Do you think she dooms herself?

[holdmybychance]

One reason I've never been fully on board with the "Mike should've been Vecna'ed in s5!!!" idea is because it makes his arc, yet again, into a passive form.

Things happen TO him, and he is denied the agency and accountability he deserves.

We're talking about Mike Wheeler, the boy who couldn't bear staying home and doing nothing while Will was missing in s1 despite only being 12, the boy who hates feeling useless and helpless, the boy who doesn't want to be the Lois Lane and who's been losing himself since s3 trying to be something he thinks he should be instead of being honest with himself and following his heart.

For his arc to be meaningful, he needs to become the active participant of his own story. He needs to make choices that aren't forced out of him by some eldritch entity, he needs to own those choices—where he knows the risk (whether physical or emotional) and still takes it anyway.

He's made mistakes in the past. Things he might feel like he can't take back or that are too late to fix (like the whole "It's not my fault you don't like girls" argument in s3 with Will, or just the same he treated Will and El in s3-4 overall), and he needs to take accountability by acknowledging the hurt and doing something about it.

No running away, no hiding, no avoidance, no repression. Something has to make him break, to make his walls crumble, and for me it would be Will getting possessed again and/or his loved ones in grave danger, not him being personally targeted by Vecna.

Because ultimately, Mike's main fear is not to be gay, but to not be enough. To not be needed. To not matter for those he cares most about.

The idea that he personally failed his loved ones would be a bigger trigger than, say, his sexuality imo.

Him having romantic feelings for Will is mostly unconscious, something he does naturally and automatically without the words to articulate it, without a clear framework. Unlike Will who's been forced to be aware of his own sexuality/identity since he was a kid due to bullying and abuse from his father, and therefore who is conscious about it, Mike is different. He got the privilege to pass as straight (on top of being white and relatively wealthy). So even if Vecna was tormenting Mike, I don't think it would be in a "You're gay and you don't belong in this world" type of scenario, but targeting instead Mike's specific fear: "You can't even protect them, you failed them, you failed to love them like they deserved, you're not needed anymore".

Not only that, but Vecna being the one to make Mike realize his feelings for Will just rubs me the wrong way. I already hate how Will felt forced to come out to everyone bc of Vecna in s5, I don't want to see another character go through that. It takes away the character's agency by "forcing" them to grow because of an external factor instead of an internal reflection and realization.

But also, I don't think it would make sense, narratively speaking, as well as for Mike as a character.

Like, why would Vecna want to do that to Mike? Why target him specifically, for what goal? Post s4, Vecna already has enough cards in his hands, he's past the individual targeting, so why Mike? And why would he care about making Mike realize his feelings for Will? If anything, it would be counter productive for Vecna, whose best interest is to keep Will isolated (and by extension, to not let Mike realize his feelings), so that Will is easier to control.

In canon, Will starts to control the Demogorgons + syphon Vecna's powers out of sheer will by accepting himself, and that self-acceptation only happened because he had the right people around him (his mom & brother, Robin, Mike, etc.). Because he is kind and selfless too, ready to sacrifice for his loved ones, sure, but also because people love him for who he is and believe in him. The fact Will is loved has always been a strong part of the show (it all started because his family and friends cared so much about him they were ready to do anything to bring him back. It shows and proves that the outcast little boy who was bullied for being queer and who would be forgotten and mocked by society was, in fact, very important and a valuable life to many. That the one boy they thought as weak was the bravest and strongest of all, in his own way).

Making Will believe Mike will never love him back or killing Mike off (and Will's loved ones in general) would be more useful to Vecna, if you think about it, as it would be the perfect way to break Will while still keeping him alive (at least if you consider Will to be necessary for whatever Vecna has in mind in s5...but since the Will/Henry storyline was dropped I guess we'll never know...).

In the end, I don't think Mike has to go through horrific trauma in order for him to have character development. He's never been the direct target of monsters, he's only involved because he chose to, because people he cared about were targeted and he refused to not do something about it.

And that's his character's most powerful strength. The fact that he's privilege and yet is ready to take some of it away to stay by his friends' side and protect them. The fact that he chooses to be involved out of love and devotion, not fear or obligation.

And that's why Will called him the Heart. When Mike is at his best, he is how Will sees him: brave and kind, a Paladin who protects and creates a safe place for his friends to exist. That's why his basement is one of the places in the show where people gather around—it's the heart of the story. It's where the story starts and the story ends.  

And Mike could've been written that way, he just wasn't because the writers suck and don't know how to handle their own story in a meaningful, coherent way.

[elpresidentenevadas]

I know my AU version of him is literally a bad guy but I'm gonna be so controversial for a moment when I say

Canon Quackity kinda sucks too.

Don't get me wrong, he's like one of my favorite characters. But he's also a dick.

I see a lot of people talking about his true relationship at the end, what was the best one, etc. And like.

None of them. He's a toxic bastard and can't hold a real relationship. He ruins every romance-or-otherwise he touches, he's selfish, and Charlie killed him for a really valid reason.

I saw someone say Sapnap and Karl were neglectful of him. Um? No, he was selfish and neglectful of THEM?

I'm of the opinion that Pumpkin Duo was mutually toxic. Schlatt was a dick but Quackity was just as horrible back.

Don't even get me started on TNT Duo.

If we go even further back, poor Eret.

Quackity is one of my absolute favorite characters but he is 100000% a villain and for a lot of reasons.