//csm 218 incoherent thoughts
very fond of the murder of the father and the sacrifice of the mother putting together asa's backstory for us & then immediately funneling itself into denji, with denji first killing the church's patriarch, barem, and then asa, who is the church's postergirl and has forever echoed makima (the Mother) unto him. CSM part 2 is full of ghosts echoing into each other;; yuko pushed her dreams of herself into asa, & asa took up the mantle of yuko's saviorhood ("as long as my heart's in the right place") & pushed her dreams into denji. & to me, it really feels like she's trying to become her mother here, whom she always has had such odd emotions about, through the deliberateness of her erasing-herself for denji who is rendered as an innocent child to the Mother's sacrifice... asking denji to eat her in order to salvage herself in an intense burst of self hate.
asa's self saboteur tendency/self hate aside i think this tragedy is also particularly punctuated for me by the quality of her reiteration of makima. like, she's verbatim quoted makima's lines to denji earlier during the asaden aquarium date but it really does come down to makima's childish & most revelatory desire of wanting to be eaten by the Chainsaw Man, the object of her affection. & she in the alleyway brought the Chainsaw Man out of child Denji to give voice to this desire. asa is positioned similarly here, & wants to be eaten too, to be erased & redeemed entirely and thus salvaged & given relief through her love for denji, & her belief that she can save him. i think it's also fun to balance what asa puts in her mouth throughout the course of part two here — her disdain for fish & fast food, what she can now eat because she's a rotten woman. very early in, she told denji how disgusting she found the fact that the Chainsaw Man ate people. & now she's offering herself to be eaten... there's a unity of the voice here, of the his & the her, that reminds me of makima's exertions.
and because i'm comparing them in terms of <how they see the chainsaw man> and what desires they smuggle into their consumption by him, it's impossible to talk about them without simultaneously bringing up the way their (makima/nayuta & asa)'s objecthood is dealt w/ in part 2. barem as Patriarch is relevant here, in the violence he directs unto nayuta and his flawed reiteration of makima's abuse specifically while distorting her image. and of course, the way the church uses asa, & how barem describes her as a cute, dumb girl, a good catch. all of them, makima and nayuta and now asa served up to be eaten by denji.
i think it's also interesting how this echo persists into the very first relationship of the series, which i think is the very core of CSM — pochita & denji, with denji laying his life into pochita's hands & asking pochita to live for him. particularly the lines where asa talks about how denji would be able to blend in with the devils w/ his face & how he'd be okay reminds me of that conversation denji had w/ pochita in the woods. the world of "humans" that pochita could live in as a devil through denji's flesh & the world of "devils" that denji could live in as a human through asa's flesh. it's kind of crazy how it all comes full circle in that alleyway, where denji first killed his Father, as a child, and found pochita, as a child. and asa uses yuko's mouth to say "i want to do the right thing", i want to dissolve myself in saving you... and stands adorned in yoru, the younger sister-abusive mother's clothes, and echoes makima's "bang" to sacrifice herself for denji. it's awful!
