Sylvia and Lucas process their feelings on Chainsaw Man's ending. Was the real Chainsaw Man the friends we made along the way?
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Lucas
Sylvia, it's no secret that the This Week In Anime crew are all big-time appreciators of Tatsuki Fujimoto's body of work, with Chainsaw Man being my own entry point to his bibliography. For all of Part 2, the below image is an approximation of what my Bluesky feed looked like every time we were graced with a new chapter on Chainsaw Man Tuesdays.
Which is why I have BIG feelings about the manga's conclusion last week, ending the title's eight-year (minus that hiatus) run as the best currently releasing manga, in my humble opinion. As someone who's long appreciated your perspective, hot takes, and jokes about the series, would you mind helping me through these emotions and maybe sharing some of your own along the way?
Sylvia
I have been thinking about this a lot, Lucas, and I'd like to propose a question: what if the real Chainsaw Man was the friends we made along the way?
But seriously, at the start here, it's worth emphasizing how singular this manga felt to me. While I've dipped in and out of keeping up with other ongoing series, Chainsaw Man was the only one I would consistently make an appointment to read on Tuesdays when it updated. Sometimes I'd be there on the Shonen Jump app on the hour. I'd lament the existence of bye weeks while eagerly anticipating what Fujimoto would cook up next time. It was an exhilarating and unpredictable ride, all the way through to its final page.
I think you might be right about the friendship angle, which is deeply frustrating to me as I've had to explain for years now that the real Chainsaw Man is actually the kickball dog.
But, I feel you on the conclusion of this seminal series hitting hard. Back when it was released on Jump, I'd always save it as the last chapter I'd read on Sunday, as it was always good enough to be a kind of narrative dessert. And now I need to find something to read on Tuesday mornings while I start my second cup of coffee! Choujin X and Dai Dark come close to scratching the same itch that CSM hit, but neither comes out as consistently, and it still wouldn't be the same.
Outside of how Chainsaw Man was pretty explicitly written in a way that's best read in a week-to-week format, the first chapter premiered the same year I graduated college. For as sappy as it is to say, this manga helped me process some big, existential feelings as I was starting "real" adulthood, and it's weirder than I'd care to admit to be a 30-year-old man without a new chapter of Chainsaw Man to look forward to.
Certainly, the world is going to look different without the presence of Chainsaw Man. Nothing is going to replace it. Should Fujimoto choose to do another shonen manga, even that won't be another Chainsaw Man. He made a weird and prickly story that constantly poked fun at itself and reveled in ultraviolence and absurdity, and somehow, the general public ate it all up. It never made sense. He stumbled into some dark alchemy. In fact, the inexplicability of Chainsaw Man's success is arguably what a big chunk of the manga came to be about.
There are lots of things that Part 2 is "about," but the metatextual angle has always dangled tantalizingly, what with the introduction of cults, copycats, and blatant commentary revolving around the existence of Chainsaw Man. And for better or worse, that angle received a big boost with Fujimoto's choice of ending.
While I don't think Chainsaw Man is by any means as much a victim of its own success as, say, My Hero Academia and it's hard pivot away from social commentary after the first few dozen chapters, clearly Fujimoto had some immediate feelings over his work seemingly becoming a grindhouse hit overnight.
And I do want to be careful about this topic, because I've noticed a tendency to focus on it to the exclusion of all other details about the series. That Fujimoto must have felt or thought a certain way, and this fact explains the entire manga. I think that's too reductive a reading to be interesting or productive. Certainly, Fujimoto must have had a litany of motivations for approaching Part 2 in the way he chose to. I don't think resentment can be the only one.
Oh, absolutely! Chainsaw Man is a rich enough text that there are loads of valid readings that people can take away from it. If I learned anything from reading Fujimoto's past work, Fire Punch, it's that the dude puts his big feelings and opinions on the page and lets them play out in a narrative format.
Also, he was pretty explicit about not wanting readers to put words in his mouth in the one-shot Just Listen to the Song...though this work of his brings up American gun culture specifical is pretty hilarious considering how much time CSM part 2 spends (correctly and deservedly) roasting Americans.
Yeah! Within the bounds of its chaos, Chainsaw Man always felt like a very deliberate work from an author confident in his voice. We see even more of that in Part 2, thanks to the hiatus, in which Fujimoto penned two other personal and critically successful one-shots, Look Back and Goodbye, Eri. That was a pretty unusual thing to do for a mangaka with the cultural zeitgeist at his disposal, but if you ask me, it paid off. Fujimoto reached a lot of people who weren't acolytes of Chainsaw Man, and perhaps because of this, Part 2 deviated from the "classic" shonen beats even more blatantly than Part 1.
Like, can you imagine this arc without the aquarium date? This scene is long, indulgent, and more iconic than any of the big fights.
For as much as I think Part 1 is just a perfect encapsulation of the tension between the unbearable weight of personhood and the boundless joy that being alive can bring, Part 2 never stopped being a delight, even as it got a bit weird and esoteric as it went on.
Even as I'm still trying to fully parse my feelings on Part 2, and trying to fully unpackage this text, I really appreciate that Chainsaw Man shows that the same kinds underlying feelings of isolation and social othering can manifest differently in different kinds of people, with social expectations around gender playing a BIG role in how people are allowed to be barely functioning people.
When Part 2 began, the most exciting thing about it was that it wasn't about Denji. It was about this awkward girl named Asa who couldn't do anything right and resented everybody else for it. She felt so authentic and familiar to me.
Asa being so unhappy while also burying her feelings to protect a facade of an identity, while Yoru is nothing but an unbridled ego that often represents Asa's most honest and destructive self, is just...perfect.
I know as critics we're not supposed to say that art is perfect, but no other word comes to mind to describe how much I felt about the above panels in particular while experiencing them for the first time.
It's really good! And exactly what I mean when I say that Part 2 is about many things, not just the phenomenon that is Chainsaw Man. Through Yoru, the narrative explores the complicated and often contradictory impulses of a developing adolescent brain as it begins to figure out who it's even supposed to be. Heck, I'm well outside my teenage years, and I'm still figuring myself and my Yoru out.
Sometimes, it really does feel like I'm yapping incessantly at a part of myself who is just standing there unfazed and unamused, who sees right through me despite my best efforts.
And I think this focus on a teen girl's interiority was a great swerve by Fujimoto! I can't tell you how much I love Asa, and I hope he takes a similar tack with his next work.
For as much as Fujimoto loves writing fucked up little freaks in his work, Asa and Yoru definitely feel like the most informed and grounded of the bunch! For as fun as their dynamic is, there's also a brutal honesty to it that's really uncomfortable in a way that feels pretty close to my own process of continually becoming a more examined and complete person.
Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't shout out how much I love the writing of Asa/Yoru and Denji's relationship early on! Wanting to make him fall in love with them so they can "own" him and turn him into a weapon, only for a tentpole of Denji's character arc in Part 1 revolving around not conflating love with ownership is such a great dynamic! This is obviously exaggerated a billion times over, but their early courtship reminds me of several relationships I've been in or adjacent to where the participants are just in fundamentally different places about what being in said relationship means or looks like.
It's straight-up romantic comedy material, and Fujimoto's acerbic sense of humor only enhances the delightful awkwardness of their courtship. Denji hardly has two brain cells to rub together, while Asa is a neurotic overthinker who gets hoisted by her own petard at every opportunity. But deep down, despite her flaws, Asa is a kind person. So is Denji, in his own way. It's just the circumstances of society that wear them down and turn them into enemies.
It's a bit upsetting how accurately Fujimoto clocked the fascist death drive at the heart of this country as it currently exists—and as it continues to worsen. He did not miss at all in that avenue.
The back half of Part 2 is definitely the stretch where Chainsaw Man feels the most like Fire Punch, in that there are a lot of big, hot-button topics on display and that we shouldn't think too closely about how all of these pieces fit together across the narrative.
But you're completely correct in that every bit of shade that CSM throws is 100% on point! Idk if Fujimoto knows who Gavin Newsom is, or if he's aware of that clout chasing goon's reactionary pivot, but I plan on spamming this image a lot come the 2028 primaries.
You're making me picture Newsom's unsettlingly toothy smile rendered in Fujimoto's style, and it might be the most frightening image my brain has ever conjured. So thank you for that.
And certainly, as this big showdown between Yoru and Chainsaw Man waged on, it felt like Part 2 was nearing its conclusion. But in typical Chainsaw Man style, it still managed to pull the rug out from basically everyone when it announced the final chapter. There was shock. There was denial. There was confusion. There was a cope.
At the risk of sounding like I'm giving into copium, I've gotta say...I don't know how folks could be reading the same manga I was if they expected Chainsaw Man to end any way other than Denji accidentally breaking the fabric of reality so badly that they've gotta reset the universe.
I, too, was taken aback by the abrupt ending announcement and hoped that there would be a Part 3 on the way, but I really don't think I could have hoped for any better conclusion to this story than broken, but deeply deserving of love, people getting something close to a quiet life together.
Is it weird that Kishibe and Kobeni don't show up at all in Part 2? Yes. Did I want to see Denji venture into Hell to reunite with Power and form a new relationship with her?? Absolutely! Did I want any kind of exploration of Pochita's exploits as the Chainsaw Devil and what motivated him to live as a dog and be Denji's best buddy??? You bet, but none of that matters nearly as much as seeing these idiots finding peace and happiness after the traumas they've endured.
Interestingly, the apparent abruptness of the ending prompted a lot of readers to conclude that Fujimoto's decision to end the manga here must have been similarly abrupt. Perhaps he simply got sick of writing it and churning it out on a serialized shonen schedule, so he just stopped. And there's plenty of precedent for canceled shonen series cobbling together an unsatisfying conclusion as a means of putting some punctuation on the work. But I think it's important to consider he was saying stuff like this back in 2021 (taken from Wikipedia):
"In an interview with the magazine Da Vinci, when asked what readers could expect from the second part, he cited the 1998 film The Big Lebowski, saying that it left him questioning the ending and feeling like it was all for nothing. He noted, however, that the protagonist and story had developed. He also loved "this sublime absurdity" and hoped to give readers "that kind of aftertaste."
That sure sounds to me like he had an idea of where Denji and Pochita were going to end up well before he started Part 2.
Plus, Chainsaw Man has historically subverted audience expectations, if not downright rejected them. It's full of anticlimaxes and strange twists. It's only appropriate that he leaves us with one more big one.
I, too, have a hard time believing the more cynical reading some folks have of the ending, or the speculation that something untoward was going on behind the scenes. This is a silly little comic about a boy who grows chainsaws out of his arms and head! The ending doesn't have to wrap up in a perfect bow to be good. I just wanted all of this to mean something to the folks involved, and it's clear that it did.
Actually, the idea that somehow these characters would come out on the other side of all these grounded and cosmic horrors and be any kind of okay, if not better off, is maybe the best and most inspiring ending I could have hoped for from my favorite manga.
To be fair, I'm still sitting with the ending myself, and with some distance, I eventually intend on rereading Part 2 as one unit to see how it holds up compared to the serialized experience. But as bittersweet as it is, I think it's correct to conclude that these characters, at least, are better off in a world without Chainsaw Man. Denji still works in Public Safety, but he himself is no longer a weapon. He has the capacity to lay down his chainsaw and extend a hand to Asa—a kind and gentle gesture that alters her fate as well.
Admittedly, I'm a sucker for open-ended and intentionally unsatisfying endings. Like, the last scene in Twin Peaks: The Return still haunts me almost a decade later. And if I Saw the TV Glow had an uplifting conclusion, I don't think it would have affected me nearly as much.
There's a quote that I love that I can never remember the attribution for, that goes something like, "How do you turn a boy into a gun? You don't let him believe he can be anything else." What drew me to Chainsaw Man originally was how much I connected with this emaciated little weirdo who was seen only as a tool or a weapon by those around him, and I immediately became enamored with watching him grow into a person while experiencing the highs and lows of that kind of agency.
Being a person and trying to live a complete life isn't easy, but god, aspiring to be more than the circumstances we're forced into is worth it and Chainsaw Man makes that clear time and time again.
One last point I'd like to make is about, you guessed it, gender. Shonen is a historically male-oriented genre, and Denji, as himself and as Chainsaw Man, embodied an exaggerated anti-hero—a sex-obsessed slacker loser who nevertheless possessed world-shattering power. Yet, as Pochita concludes, none of this power fantasy, i.e., the accumulation of male wish fulfillment, really made Denji happy. He was on a treadmill with no end in sight. By contrast, in the new timeline, he's subservient to Power and Nayuta, two domineering women, and it seems to be working out for him. At the very least, he doesn't seem embroiled in any apocalyptic conspiracies. I think that's interesting.
But now that Fujimoto, like Denji, is untethered from his old chains, I wonder what new ones he will don. I'd definitely love to see more one-shots from him. Or something out of left field, like a straightforward drama. Or Fire Punch 2. The possibilities are endless.
If nothing else, it does feel like a rebuke of the capitalistic undertones that were hyper-present in the early parts of the series, that being happy with what you have is far more important than constantly striving for more. While on a surface level, these closing dynamics might seem no different than what Makima was trying to do in Part 1, the fact that the people around him now value Denji for things that are intrinsic to him rather than seeing him as a vehicle to some kind of impossible ideal makes a world of difference.
More than anything, I want Fujimoto to take a well-earned BREAK next. But after that, I too think he does his best work in one-shots, and how he spends the next stretch of his career getting as wild and weird as he wants to with outings that are personally meaningful to him. Now that he's unshackled from this chain(saw), I can't wait to see what he does next!
Maybe he can use this time to catch up on his movie backlog (Fujimoto, please share your Letterboxd). But given how prolific he's been since his teenage years, I doubt he'll stay away from manga for long. He has his own kind of heart-thump disease that keeps him writing stories, and I will selfishly hope that there's no cure for it.
My one request for Fujimoto is that he pen a sequel to Chainsaw Man where Denji sees a real cardiologist; but after that, the sky (which may or may not be made of doors) is the limit!
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